Human Language 1 Colorless Green Ideas

(announcer) The Human Language series

was funded by the National Endowment
for the Humanities,

the National Science Foundation,

the Annenberg Foundation,

the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations,

the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,

annual financial support
from viewers like you,

the National Institute of Mental Health,

the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation,

and these additional funders.

[dinging]

(George Miller) What is language?

Everybody knows, thank heavens.

[people talking]

(female) Is language simple
or is language complex?

(George Carlin) The girl that
that's the house of's father.

(narrator) This is Part 1 of a series
on the human language.

(male) The question is: how can
you learn so much from so little?

(Roy) The question is: how does
a child know what a word is?

(Lewis) How is it that we can
so alter our thought patterns

to fit into the linear arrangement
of any particular arrangement?

[girls speaking]

(female) I thought
you had already broke up.

(female #1) No, he broke up with me
before I could break up with him.

(narrator) What specific biological
endowment could we have

that allows us to do this?

[man shouting]

[children shouting]

(female) Is there something true,

some core of properties true
of all human languages?

[man shouting]

[children shouting]

[people speaking different languages]

(Noam Chomsky) How do people
simply interact with language?

How do people do
what I am now doing?

Or if you meet somebody,
say at a bus stop,

and you start having a conversation,

how do you do it?

(woman) Take care of yourself.

(Mark) People don't think when they speak,
they just speak.

(narrator) This is a report
on a study of an enigma.

[people talking in background]

Language is the most human thing
there is about being human,

yet most people don't think much about it.

Traditionally, linguists have
studied the history, vocabulary,

and grammar of the world's languages,

but within our generation,

new theories have
revolutionized our thinking.

Today, linguists ask questions
about how we use language

and how language functions
inside the human mind.

For example, why are languages
filled with rules we all follow

without knowing why?

(female) How would you describe this?

(female) Well, I know it's supposed
to be a big red balloon.

(female) How about a red big balloon?

Could this be a red big balloon?

(male) A big red balloon.

(female) Okay.

Do you have any idea why you feel
more comfortable saying a big --

Do you have a sense of why that feels
better than a red big balloon?

(male) I have no reason why.

(male) Three big red round plastic balls.

Not big three round plastic red big balls.

(narrator) Linguists claim that
languages is rule governed.

What rules?

(George Carlin) Stop and go traffic.

Should be go and stop traffic.
You can't stop until you've gone.

[cars honking]

(Mark) You can re-climb
and you can re-institutionalize,

but you can't re-fall down.

[chuckles]
I don't know why that is.

It's peculiar.

Why can't you re-fall down?

(Howard) And you can say things like
"Don't rouse up the natives,"

but you can't say,
"Don't rouse up them."

You have to say,
"Don't rouse them up."

(Russell) Language is untidy.

Language is a mess.

(male) "That John left surprised me."

What's the "that" doing there?

I mean, everybody knows you can't say,

"John left surprised me."

There's something wrong with that.

The rules of English say you
got to have a "that" in front.

Well, why?

[female speaking French]

(female) Could you do it
the other way around?

[female speaking French]

(female) And is that fine?

(female) No, it's not.

The first one is fine,

the other one you just will never say it.

(child) A big red balloon.

(Mark) Those are just
the rules of my language

that I learned totally
unconsciously as a little child.

(female) It's the same old story.

(George Carlin) What's going on in here?

(female) It's the old same story?

(narrator) Who or what tells us
how to say it?

(Noam) The language faculty is a
system, a subsystem, of the brain,

of the human brain.

Its major elements don't appear
to exist in other similar organisms.

And that organ of the brain yields
a language under appropriate conditions,

which is partially tuned
by the environment

but to a large extent
appears to be determined

by our biological endowment

and is essential invariant
across the species.

(Frederick) There have really
been three major revolutions

in modern linguistics.

The first, about 200 years ago,

found change is irregular.

That you can reconstruct
ancient languages

and talk about how
language has changed

from the ancient times to the present.

The second was at the turn
of this century

where it was discovered that
languages themselves are systematic.

That there are rules governing
how languages are put together.

The third revolution came
with Noam Chomsky

in his book Syntactic Structures in 1957.

(Howard Lasnik) In 1957, Chomsky published
this little book, Syntactic Structures.

And it almost immediately
revolutionized the field.

It had a profound influence on
everyone who read it carefully,

and the reason for this is the beauty of
the analyses that Chomsky presented.

He was able to show that there were
patterns when it had just looked like

there were many separate facts

and he was able to come up
with very simple rules

for explaining these patterns.

(Frederick) Basically what
Chomsky said was

that your sights aren't set high enough.

You're asking the wrong questions.

You're not asking the most
interesting questions.

What you're asking is,

"Well, we know language is a system
so how should we divide it up?

Where should we draw
the line in a word,

where should we draw the line
in the sentence,

what are the pieces?"

Chomsky said,
"Let's ask a different question.

Let's ask a much more ambitious question.

Let's ask the question, 'What is
a possible human language?' "

(Howard) What was so appealing
about this analysis

and what was so revolutionary about it

is it showed that there's
some process in your head,

some rule, some pattern
that you have abstractly.

And you use this rule in producing
sentences and in understanding sentences.

That is, he moved linguistics away

from merely gathering
and investigating sentences

that have already been produced

and moved it towards the investigation
of human potentiality.

What kinds of sentences
can you produce,

what kinds of sentences
can you understand?

[people talking in background]

(Frederick) Once you say,

"What is a possible human language?"

in a way you're saying,
"What is a possible human being?"

How does the human mind work?

[woman speaking Xhosa language]

(Noam) Well, the most elementary
property of human language

that one can imagine

is that we can create new expressions
which express new thoughts.

So for example, the sentences
that I'm now producing,

you may not have heard,

I may not have said before.

Maybe they're new in the history
of the human race.

(George Carlin) Here's something
no one has ever said before:

Toss that anchor over here,

I have room for two or three
more of them in my hip pocket.

(Lila) The point of a language
is to be able to say things

you've never said before
and never heard before

and to understand things
the first time you hear them

that have never been said
before to your knowledge

and maybe never been said before at all.

But if you're going to be able to say
and understand new things,

you must have acquired something
very general, a system.

(George Miller) There are, perhaps,
in English, there are about 40 sounds.

The sounds get combined to form --

well, most people know 40,000 words,
something of that sort.

(George Carlin) Swimming.

(female) Cacophony

(Mark) Antidisestablishmentarianism.

(male) Lunch.

(George Miller) Words are built out of sounds

and there are a limited number of them.

Sentences are built out of words

and there's no limit to
the number of sentences

that you can compose in a language.

(Mark) You could say
that words are like atoms.

The way atoms are in chemistry,
as the basic building blocks,

those are what the words are.

They're fairly solid things
and you take these atoms

and you put them together
to make up the molecules,

or the sentences.

(Russell) I remember Senator
Joseph McCarthy at one time saying,

"That's the most unheard
of thing I've ever heard of."

[laughs]

Nobody could have invented
that sentence before McCarthy spoke it.

(Mark) It's really a deceptively
simple system.

The genius of the system is that
with a small number of words

and this system of grammar,

you can make up an infinite
number of sentences.

You can make up a sentence
to fit any occasion.

(child) And mommy just goes
to sleep but Daddy just goes--

Daddy just, um--

(male narrator) The system starts with words.

Deceptively simple.

But the question is: what is a word?

How does a child know what a word is?

(child) --to his friend's house.

(Judith) You could ask somebody,
"What is a word?"

And most people think they know
what a word is until you ask them.

[child laughing]

(female) I word is, uh‚ --

(George Carlin): A word is --

(Judith Klavans) And you're
trying to find it

and you can't put your finger on it.

You don't know.

(Jeff) A word is--

[man speaking other language]

(child) Pencil.

(female) Language.

A word is something that someone
thought up a long, long time ago.

What is a word?

That's actually an extraordinarily
difficult question.

(Lewis) I haven't the ghost
of an idea.

I can't even make up
a plausible evasion.

(Suzette) You could say a word
is the smallest separate piece

of a language that, all by itself,

will have a meaning.

(male narrator) On the other hand.

(Howard) There are words that
are composed, themselves,

of smaller units of bare meaning,
like "kicked",

where "kick" has a meaning and
"ed" has another meaning,

like past tense.

(Judith) And I didn't do that.

"n't" is it a word?

(male) One of my favorite words is
antidisestablishmentarianism.

It's an interesting word,
of course, because everybody thinks

that it's the longest word
in the English language.

In fact, there are many words in English

that are far longer than antidisestablishmentarianism.

Most of them chemical terms.

(Roy) You know, the longest
word in Webster's 7th

is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolca
nokoniosis,

a disease of the lungs.

(Mark) Infixes and prefixes and suffixes.

(George Carlin) I used to wonder:

pre- and suf- are prefixes.

Suf- is the prefix of suffix.

Is -fix the suffix for prefix and suffix?

(Mark) Words seem to
be somehow indivisible,

but you look at them closely

and they've got all kinds
of little parts to them.

(female) What's this?

I know there's a word for this.

(Alvin) I think, for example,
of the word apodictic.

Now, that is not only illegal
phonological structure,

I happen to know it's a word

because I've seen it in print

and I've even looked it up
in the dictionary,

but I simply can't remember
what it means.

(Howard) I haven't a clue
what apodictic means.

(Mujinga) [speaking African language]

I'm from Africa. Zaire.

Mujinga means a child born with
an umbilical cord all over her body.

(Lewis) Most words certainly
are complicated words,

like human or like generous,

are really small tiny sentences
all wrapped up

in one set of phonemes.

[Dan speaking Turkish]

That's a single Turkish word.

One of my favorite words

because it comes out as
a whole sentence in English.

It means, "Are you one of those that
we haven't been able to Europeanize?"

[woman speaking Xhosa language]

(Jeff) One example from
the Eskimo language I work with,

which is called Aleutic,

is the word [Aleutic word]

which means, "Don't you want to
go window shopping with me?"

(Roy) The easy thing to say,

for me since I deal with computers a lot,

is that a word is the sequence
of letters between two blanks.

(Mark) But what about when we speak?

We don't have little spaces
when we speak,

we just run everything together.

(George Carlin) O-m-m-i-n-a.

Ommina.

It means, "I am going to."

[people singing and laughing]

(Suzette) You know,
when you listen to people talk,

unless they deliberately pause

between the pieces
of what they're saying,

it all runs together.

(George Carlin) How do we know where
the gaps are in between the words?

Because this all sounds
like one whole sound.

This is just one long sound to me.

But you know that I said,
"This is just one long sound to me."

(male) Why are you weary?

Why are you weary?

(Mark) I walk up to you and say,

"Steal it!" or "Teach it!"

(male) What'd you want to do now?

(female) I don't know,
what do you want to do?

(male) Dunno.

An apple?

(girl) Yeah.

(male) Okay, so will you go home now?

Okay.

(George Carlin) I'm going to go
get the bus and go home.

(Mark) This may be the hardest thing
that the brain ever has to do.

Is to figure out those
boundaries at the words

that people have just
run together in speech.

(male) Why are you weary?

Why are you weary?

(Mark) People have invested
millions of dollars

and Lord knows how many hours
in trying to devise machinery

that will be able to perform this task

of breaking spoken
language up into words

so that it can be understood.

And yet, a child, by the age of one,

is perfectly able to understand speech,

natural speech,

and just pick it apart into words.

[child babbling]

(Mark) So what's a word?

They're very slippery objects.

Difficult to deal with.

[child babbling]

(Mark) Words stand for things.

The word "tree" stands for a tree.

But words are more than that.

After all, the word "tree"
doesn't just stand for that tree

or even any individual tree.

It stands for the general notion of a tree.

The concept of a tree.

That's what Plato would have told us.

But then that raises
the question of concept.

What's a concept?

(male narrator) What do we have
in our minds before we speak?

Are there concepts
we do not need to invent

because we are born
already knowing them?

Plato said so and so does Chomsky.

(Noam) Well, suppose I have, say, a box

and I have a marble inside the box
and a marble outside the box.

And I ask, "Which marble
is near to the box?"

Well, the answer is that
the marble outside the box

is either near the box
or not near it,

but the marble in the box
can't be near it.

But again, that's one
of those simple things

that we ought to be surprised about.

How does a child know that a marble
that's in a box can't be near the box?

(female teacher) Suppose I had a box

and I put one marble outside the box

and I put another marble inside the box.

And I ask you,
"Which marble is near the box?"

Which one would you say?

Charlie?

(Charlie) Outside.

(female) The one outside?

What would you say?

(child) The one outside.

(female) Why?

(child) Because the one outside
is really out.

The one inside is just like
it's inside the box.

It isn't even near it.

It's touching the box.

(Noam) Notice, if the box
is a geometrical object,

say a sphere in the geometrical sense,

then the--
or a cube--

the marble can be near the box.

The marble is near the box's surface.

So the geometrical object is the surface.

So something inside it can be near it

just as something outside it can be near it.

But we don't develop concepts
like that naturally.

We have to invent them in
some other faculty of the mind.

(child) The one outside
because the one inside isn't near.

(child) It isn't actually that
both of them are near.

One is near and one is not.

(female) Okay, now which one is it?

(child) Here.

(Noam) The concept of the box
that we actually develop

is a very obscure one.

It includes the interior

but it doesn't matter what's inside it.

So if the box is filled up with marbles
or if it's just full of air,

it's the same box.

Our concept of box includes the interior

but it doesn't care
what's inside the interior.

Now, that's an extremely abstract concept,

far beyond what any evidence
could ever drive.

There's no evidence that
the child has available

that tells the child that
the box isn't just its surface.

And in fact, if we were to invent a science,

we would make it just a surface
as we do in geometry and physics.

Now, what that means is that

the concept with all of
its incredible intricacy

must be fixed by the mind

and just keyed by some trivial fact
about the environment.

(female) There.
There she goes.

Oh! Where did it go?

Where's the duck?

Where's the duck?

(male narrator) We just know
that a box has an interior

but it doesn't matter what's inside.

♪ [music playing]

What a concept.

(George Miller) In everyday conversation,

we are enormously creative.

(child) Boy, one more minute
of those hot lights

and I'd be fried shish-kabob.

(George Miller) It's almost certain
that any 20 word sentence you hear

will be a brand new, a newly minted,

newly created sentence
that has never been uttered before

and probably you've never heard it before.

(George Carlin) Here's another one
no one has ever said before:

I'm going over to the softball game
and beat up Hitler's widow.

(Mark) What really--

What language is really about

is putting the words together
into these sentences.

(George Miller) Suppose that it's
possible to choose the next word

in what you're going to say
as any one of a hundred words.

Now, make it even easier.

Say if any one of ten words
that you can use to continue.

So the first word that you pick is one of ten.

And now you go on and
you say a second word

and it is also one of ten.

So the total number of possible
combinations of two words

will be ten times ten, or a hundred.

Now you go on to say a third word.

And they're ten possibilities there,

and that means now we have a
thousand three-word combinations.

And if we go on to a fourth word,

there will be10,000.

So the number of possible messages
is increasing very rapidly

as the length of the message increases.

(child) A little little hat,

and in that little little hat

he had a little little cat,

and in that little little cat
he had a little little rat,

and in that little little rat
he had a little little mouse.

(Howard) This is the desk that
sits in the office that I work in.

Now we can take that
still larger sentence

and put it together into
a larger sentence still:

this is the clutter

that's piled on the desk
that sits in the office that I work in.

There doesn't seem to be any limit on that.

(George Miller) How many sentences
would we have if we had,

say, 20 word sentences?

That would be 10 to the 20th power.

How big a number is 10 to the 20th power?

[scream]
[piano going down scale]

Let's see.

To compare with --

There's something like three times ten
to the 9th seconds in a century.

(child) He had an eraser
and in that little little eraser

there was a clock,

and in that little little clock
there was a hand.

(female teacher) Period.

[children laughing]

(Howard) One of the basic formal
properties that allows for this creativity

is the process of taking a sentence

and putting it inside another sentence
to create a still larger sentence.

(female teacher) That was really
really really really really long.

[bubbly sound]

(George Miller) There's no longest sentence

and that's why the number of possible
sentences is countably infinite.

(Russell) General Alexander Haig,
when he was Secretary of State,

once told a Senate foreign
relations committee,

"There is a conscious castration of America's
eyes and ears around the world."

Whatever that meant.
[laughs]

But surely nobody could have ever
spoken that sentence before Haig

and nobody would ever speak it again.

(male) Have a nice day.

(female) Nice talking to you.

(male) Same here.

(George Miller) But what
about shorter sentences?

10 word sentences, five word sentences?

(male) Twenty-five cents.

five for a dollar.

It takes two seconds.

(male) Do you, Lydia, take
Raphael in holy matrimony

for as long as you both shall live?

(female) Yes.

(George Miller) Of course, some short
sentences can be used over and over and over.

(male) Do you, Carlos, take Raquel
in holy matrimony

for as long as you both shall live?

Do you, Chi-Meng, take Chun-Han
in holy matrimony

for as long as you both shall live?

Do you, Byron, take Arrisellis
in holy matrimony

for as long as you both shall live?

(male) Five for a dollar.

It takes two seconds.

(male) As you both have
consented to wedlock--

(male) But short sentences
can be improbable too.

(male) I pronounce you
husband and wife.

You may kiss your bride.

Kiss your bride, Raphael.

Kiss your bride.

(George Miller) For example, you've
probably never heard anyone say before,

"Short sentences can be improbable too."

♪ [music]

(male) Okay. Laura and Orlando.

(Mark) We have a kind of
tension operating here.

We have a system that is
very strict in certain ways

and yet one which allows you
many degrees of freedom

as long as you stay
within the bounds of the system.

(male) Next morning, just before dawn--

(Mark) You've got words,
a finite number of words.

You've got a very small number of rules.

And between them, you can make up
an infinite number of sentences.

That's the system.

(male) Simple.

(child) I got a cold.
Good-bye.

(Noam) The beginning,
the very beginnings of science

are always the capacity

to be able to be amazed
by apparently simple things.

For example, if you assume that
an apple falls to the ground

because that's its natural place,

it's not surprising.

You haven't done science.

If you begin to ask yourself,

"Why does the apple fall to the ground
and not rise to the sky?"

If you allow yourself to be puzzled
by that simple fact,

well, then you find you have a rather
serious question before you.

And science begins.

(Frederick) How did sound and
meaning ever get linked tougher?

When you think about it,

there's really no two things that
are more different from each other

than sound and meaning.

Meaning, the ideas in the brain,
you know, to put it in simple terms.

Sounds, these things that come out
of our lungs and our vocal cords.

They're totally different.

How did they ever get linked.

What biological event
could have created this?

Well, the biological event was
the creation of grammar, syntax.

What grammar is

is a system that allows these
mismatched components,

sound and meaning,
to be linked to each other.

(male narrator) The first task of grammar
is to organize words in a line,

one after another.

An event is about to take place.

Will we report it in the order in
which things actually happened?

Is there a natural order of events?

A woman fell from the cable car.

We say the woman first,
then the cable car.

Because the woman came first?

But surely the cable car was
already there before the woman fell.

(Dan) It seems evident,

if you compare your thoughts and
perceptions to the things that you say,

that there's a very direct relationship

between what you experience
and how you talk about it.

But in fact, there's a great mystery

because when we speak,

we have to say things
one word after another.

We have no choice.
That's the way language works.

But when we see things
and experience things,

they don't necessarily come
bit by bit in a linear order.

(Howard) The boy kicks the ball.

Which comes first in reality?

The boy?

Then the kick?

Then the ball?

This is one of the puzzles
of syntax that

the form of a sentence is often
independent of its meaning.

(Dan) Because boy, ball, and kick
can occur in any order in language.

In perception, they occur simultaneously.

(Howard) In fact, the order of the words
doesn't seem to have anything to do

with the order of events.

(Dan) But we have to arrange it
in one way or another

in order to speak about it.

One of the major tasks of using
language is to take something

which is essentially atemporal, nonlinear,

and to arrange it in linear patterns

in order to make different kinds of words.

(male narrator) Does the form of
a sentence depend on its meaning?

(Howard) There's a famous
example sentence in linguistics

that Chomsky's been talking
about since the ‘50s.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

(female) Colorless green ideas
sleep furiously.

(Noam) Well, a small industry has been
spawned by one linguistic example,

namely "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously"

which has been the source
of poems and arguments

and set to music and so on.

(male) Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

(Howard) This is a very interesting sentence

because it shows that syntax
can be separated from semantics.

That form can be separated from meaning.

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously"
doesn't seem to mean anything coherent

but it sounds like an English sentence.

If you read it back to front,

"Furiously sleep ideas green colorless,"

that wouldn't sound like English at all.

(child) Colorless green ideas
sleep furiously.

(Noam) Well, that tells us that

there's more to what determines
the structure of a sentence

than whether it has meaning or not.

(Howard) If you tried out
the sentence on the child,

I bet the child would giggle.

[child laughing]

But I suspect that
the reaction would be different

if you tried out "Furiously sleep
ideas green colorless."

You might get a blank stare instead.

For a sentence to be a sentence
of English in terms of its structure,

it doesn't seem to matter
much what the words mean

or whether they go together
in a meaningful way.

Just, they go together in a way
that obeys the rules of syntax.

(Stephen) Syntax.

No other animal seems to have it.

We have to assume, I think, that
something so distinct, so complex,

so much at the basis of human
achievement is an evolved capacity.

(Howard) One term that
Chomsky has used a lot

is the term "universal grammar."

And this term flows
naturally from the idea

that you inherit many of the principles
and processes involved in the grammar,

your knowledge of
your particular language.

(male) There are 5000,

maybe more than 5000, languages
spoken in the world.

But in fact, what Chomsky noticed

is that these 5000 languages of
the world are really very, very similar.

(Noam) As human beings,

we are naturally interested
in the differences among humans.

We take the similarities
among humans for granted

so we're interested in the way
humans look different from one another

and their faces are so different

and their sizes are so different

and the way they behave
is so different and so on.

From the point of view of,
say, some Martian,

we would all look alike,

just as from our point of view,
all frogs look alike.

Now, from the point of view of the frog,

they probably--
Frogs look, I'm sure,

very much different from one another

because they're interested
in the differences among frogs.

We just notice the overwhelming
respects in which they're similar.

Now, if we can reach the--

If we can make the leap of the imagination

that enables us to look at ourselves
the way we look at other organisms,

we will quickly discover
that we're remarkably alike.

[people speaking other languages]

(female) Mine air is much
enamored of thy note.

[people speaking other languages]

(Lila) In fact, the differences,

the existing differences
among human languages

has, in this sense, been called
by Chomsky "trivial."

[people speaking other languages]

(Lila) Trivial compared
with the differences

between the human
languages taken together

and any other system of communication

by other kinds of animals,

by intelligent machines,
and the like.

These are all vastly different

from the set of human languages

which, by comparison, are very,
very much like each other.

[people speaking other languages]

(Dan) There are two major ground plans,

two great options in building a language:

relying on the order of words to convey
the meaning of your overall thought.

(male narrator) English.

(Dan) Or changing the endings
of your words one by one

and shuffling them around.

(male narrator) Latin.

(George Miller) For example, instead of
counting on order as we do in English,

we might do it by saying,
"Marya hit Johnum."

By which we mean that Mary
is clearly the actor, the "a" word,

and John is clearly the one acted
upon, the "um" word.

(Dan) This is simple book in English.

Well, in Russian it's [Russian word]
if I hold it up and show it to you,

but if I'm holding it up
or I'm reading it,

then it becomes [Russian word]
rather than [Russian word].

We change the ending because
when we're acting on an object,

we have to say it differently.

These endings are what
grammarians call inflections.

(George A. Miller) You might wonder how
many languages use the order ground plan,

how many languages use
the inflectional ground plan.

And it's very, very hard to
answer a question like that

because every language
uses a little of both.

In English, for example,
we use word order very much

but we still have inflections like
the plural "s" at the end of words.

That's an inflection that
signifies the number.

Over a period of time
in the history of a language,

it may change from being
a highly inflected language

to being a language without inflections

and then change back again.

(Dan) We see this happening
in English now

if you think of the ending "'ve" on
could've, should've, would've.

That "'ve" isn't a word anymore.

It's not "have," it's just 've".

It's becoming a grammatical ending.

(male narrator) If there are universal
features to human language,

wouldn't that apply to
all people everywhere,

even ancient people like the Warlpiri?

Their language has been closely studied.

What ground plan do they follow?

(Mary Laughren) I'm studying the language
of the Warlpiri people of central Australia.

The Warlpiri people are
the Aboriginal inhabitants

of a very vast area of central Australia.

(male narrator) Mary Laughren, field linguist,

has been living with the Warlpiri
for over a decade.

[people speaking Warlpiri language]

(Mary) The Warlpiri language
is a very interesting language.

Like other Australian,
central Australian languages,

it has probably been spoken
in relative isolation

from non-Australian languages,

possibly up to 60,000 years.

So that makes it very interesting
for research for linguists

who are interested in finding out about
differences between languages

but particularly, more particularly,

finding about what is common
to human language.

(male narrator) The Warlpiri people
were nomads until a short time ago.

Now they cluster in the town of Yuendumu

where they have adopted
many European ways.

[people speaking Warlpiri language]

(male narrator) As nomads, they value
things they can carry in their heads

instead of on their backs,
like language.

Stories which can be told
in paintings or in words.

[people speaking Warlpiri language]

(male narrator) Here, the subtle use
of language is highly prized.

[people speaking Warlpiri language]

(male narrator) Jakomara's painting
is the story of a whirlwind,

a legend going back to prehistory
in the time they call The Dreaming.

[people speaking Warlpiri language]

(male narrator) There is an unusual
sign language version of Warlpiri

for use in special situations.

(Mary) No. Nobody speaks
a primitive language.

All language is extremely sophisticated.

All human language constitutes
a very, very sophisticated system.

(male narrator) Warlpiri turns out to
be an inflected word ending language

like Greek or Latin.

(Mary) That was one word
I just typed into the dictionary there.

Warlpiri's typically a language
that has very, very long words

made up of many, many meaningful parts.

Unlike English, Warlpiri
doesn't rely on the order

in which words come in a sentence

to convey the sort of meaning
order conveys in English.

What Warlpiri uses instead
are little suffixes

which go onto a given word

and which indicates the role of that word.

So for example, to say,
"The boy kicked the ball in Warlpiri,"

we would say something
like [Warlpiri sentence A].

[Warlpiri word A] is the word for ball.

[Warlpiri word B] is the word for boy.

But to indicate that they boy
is the doer of the action,

we have an extra little piece on it,
which is [Warlpiri suffix]

so we say [Warlpiri word C].

And then we have
the verb [Warlpiri word D]

and then we have [Warlpiri word E].

In Warlpiri, the exact same message
would come across

if I changed the order of the words,

for example, and said
[Warlpiri sentence A]

or [Warlpiri sentence B].

Or I could say [Warlpiri sentence C].

However, it doesn't matter
what order the words are in.

the exact same message will
come across, that I am saying,

"The boy kicked the ball."

[children playing]

♪ [piano and bells music]

(Dan) However different languages
may seem on the surface,

underneath they seem to be cut
out of the very same pattern.

There are striking similarities
of organization.

♪ [music continues]

In a way, it's like the human face.

The human face is very simple:
two eyes, a nose, and a mouth.

You can draw a simple sketch of it.

But look at the incredible diversity.

Each one of us has
a uniquely different face,

yet each face is obviously
a human face.

Languages are the same.

Each one is obviously
a different language,

but they're clearly examples
of the same kind of system.

(Jerry) One thing you might think to ask --

it's actually quite an interesting
topic to think about--

is "Just how good is language
at doing the job

which it's designed to do?"

(George Miller) Language serves
a great many human purposes,

but it can't do everything.

(Jerry) I mean, after all, if
it's just a biological adaptation,

which is what I'm suggesting,

then you'd expect,
like other biological adaptations, it

would have--

there would be limits on the fit

between the job that it does
and the job that it's designed to do.

(George Miller) Suppose I wanted
you to meet a friend of mine

at the train station and
you didn't know this friend

and I didn't have a photograph of him

and so I was trying to describe him.

And he's about 5 feet 8 inches tall

and he has brown hair
and a very ordinary face.

And I'm sure he'll be wearing clothes.

I don't know how to describe him to you

but perhaps you could meet him anyhow.

Would you please?

♪ [music playing]

(female) Something which
turns around and comes down.

(male) How can you explain
the concept of a spiral?

You almost have to make
use of a gesture like that.

(female) Can I use my hands?

(female) Sure.

(George Miller) I give advice.
If I say, "There's a leafy tree,"

well, how leafy is it?

(female) Something that twists
around in rotating circles.

(male) Circular.

Circular motion.
It's kinda like a slinky.

(George Miller) How leafy is a tree?

If you look at it,
you can tell immediately.

But trying to describe it,

I can't count the leaves and
tell you how many there are.

(Jerry) Can one imagine a system

that might communicate thought
better than natural languages?

Well, certainly, there's some purpose.

(George Carlin) For instance,
giving directions to someone.

Language is not as good as handing
them a map and saying,

"Look, I live here.
You go right down like that."

(male) Go down.

To North Harrison Street.

Just drawing it now.

Harrison Street, to Route 1.

(David) Someone could describe
a spiral without using gestures

but it would take a rather complex,

a series of sentences to do it.

(male) A loop which proceeds
in two dimensions.

It's got at rotational component

and the component going
transverse to that direction.

(male) Make a left.

Go down, you'll see
the state police barracks

right on the left hand side.

(George Carlin) Jonathan
Windows used to say,

"You go on down about a good
hundred miles and take a right."

(male) It's back about 250 yards.

Go through that guard booth.

(George Carlin) Or is to the left.

(Noam) The very nature of language
design leads to the consequence

that there are thoughts
which are perfectly fine thoughts

that are not expressible directly
through the mechanisms of language.

Language is a system with structure,

and any system with structure
and design has scope and limits.

If it had no intrinsic structure and design,

it could do nothing.

It would achieve nothing. It

would be useless for anything.

But the very structure that it has

not only provides it with its capacities

but also imposes certain limits on it.

So, for example, take a tool,
a physical tool, say a hammer.

If it was just an amorphous blob,

you couldn't do anything with it.

If it's a hammer with
a particular structure,

you can do certain things with it

but you can't do other things with it.

If a tool is going to be useful
for any purpose,

it's going to have to have structure

and that's going to prevent it from
being used for other purposes.

(Jerry) On the other hand,

there's a lot of expressive power
built into our linguistic capacity

that's easy to overlook.

I mean, people go around
telling you things like--

Not only do maps

show you how to get there easier
than you can describe it,

but moreover, a single picture
is worth thousands of words

and all that sort of stuff.

In a sense, it's true.

In a sense, it's also not.

We can do things of
great subtlety with language

that it's very hard to imagine
doing in any other way.

(George Miller) Much of the subtlety of
language comes, of course, from the syntax.

But there's also subtlety
in the words themselves.

Words can be associated
arbitrarily with anything.

We think of them being
associated with objects,

but they can be associated with ideas,

which abstractions,
with anything you like.

Words can be associated
with anything you can think of.

(Mark) Language is arbitrary.

There's no connection between
the thing and what we call the thing.

It's abstract.

You can talk about things
that really aren't there.

Things that have no form.

A word like "form," for example.

Now what is the meaning
of the word "form"?

Or a word like "truth."

That terrible word that
philosophers have discussed

for so many thousands of years.

What is truth?

We don't know.

We just have a word for it.

It's an arbitrary word.

(female) Love.

What does love mean?

What's love?

(Mark) So language is completely arbitrary.

Words are arbitrary.

(male) It can be anything you want.

Is that a light?

That's a lulu.

Turn the lulu on.

(Mark) Even little kids know that.

So my son, for example,
who is four years old.

He comes down for breakfast,

he sits down in his chair,

and he says, "I want gump for breakfast."

And you say, "Peter, what is gump?"

And he looks and he says,
"Gump is cereal."

(Noam) So, for example,
whether I call a tree

a tree or whether I call it a Baum as I would
if I grew up in Germany somewhere,

that's obviously variable.

(Mark) The thing and what you
call a thing have nothing at all

to do with one another.

(child) Dinosaur.

[man speaking other language]

(George Carlin) Pancakes.

(female) Infrastructure.

(George Miller) Different languages
have totally different vocabularies.

Different names for the same things.

Different names for different things,
depending on what they use.

(male) Words for camel.

(Michael) The Arabs have dozens

if not scores of words for camel and lion

and horse and other elements
of their civilization.

(Mary) The vocabulary of
each language reflects

the way of life of the people
who speak that language.

So people obviously need words
to talk about things

they want to talk about.

(George Miller) If you live at the North Pole,

bamboo is not important to you.

(male) [word in other language]
is a skinny camel.

[word in other language]
is a young female camel.

(Mark) There's got to be
a word for everything.

Every little piece in this boat,
you've got a different word for it.

You've got all these lines.

Each one's got a different name for it.

(sailor) This particular one is
the halyard for the spinnaker.

And over here, the halyard for
the burgee to fly a yacht club

or other identifying flag
from the top of the mast.

(male) [word in other language] is
a camel used for transporting loads.

[word in other language]
is used for camels in general.

(male) That horizontal appendage

projecting from the right side of
the dress plate is the lances rest.

The shoulders are covered
by the pauldrons.

The arms, including the upper and
lower arms and bend of the elbow

are covered by the vanbraces.

The left and right vanbrace.

(sailor) And so we have a topping lift
to hold up the end of the pole.

We have the halyard and a
downhaul on the butt of the pole

to raise and lower it
on the track on the mast.

(male) The shield is known
as the escutcheon.

And the steel covered shoe
is known as the sabotin.

(female) What do you call these camels?

(male) Well, I call them Beat,
Jess, Tom, Joe, Jerry, and Billy.

[people speaking other language]

(Henry) The Czech word
for ostrich is pstros.

(female) Bone.

(female) Grody.

[woman speaking other language]

(female) Elliptical.

(male) Lunch.

Pumpkin.

(male) We just have a word for it
so we can talk about it.

♪ [music playing]

(Jerry) Roughly speaking,

the achievement of language

is to provide a form of words
that allows us to say

anything we can think of.

(Thomas) You can make all kinds
of statements about conditions

as you wish them to be,

conditions as they might be,

conditions as they were once upon a time,

or conditions as they
will be in the future.

An animal cannot make
this kind of statement

because this kind of
statement is possible

only by means of language.

(Jerry) Consider, for example,

negation, right.

It's easy to tell somebody
that it's not going to rain.

Try drawing them a picture
of "It's not going to rain."

Or try drawing them a picture of

"If I had let the hammer go,
it would have fallen on my toe."

(George Carlin) In language, you can say,

"If we drop this piano,

it's not going to play a polonaise."

(Jerry) Think about a giraffe
standing beside me.

(Thomas) Here we are communicating
about a world of our imagination.

Imagination, if you like,
is also a human construct.

(Frederick) The edge that
language gave us

that no other animal has,

no other being has,

is the ability to think abstractly.

That's really what language
can do for us.

We seem to have this drive
to think abstractly.

We're propelled to do it.

It's not even a choice.

Because language itself is abstract,

we seem to be led to think abstractly.

Because we can think abstractly,

we don't have to talk about

what's in our immediate
physical environment.

We can plan for the future.

We can create art.

We can create complex
social organizations.

All of these things are possible
because we can think abstractly.

[bells music in background]

(female) Since my house burned down,

I now have a better view
of the rising moon.

♪ [woman singing in Xhosa]

(Dan) Language, like any
complex human phenomenon,

can be studied from many
different points of view.

And contemporary linguists specialize.

Some like to study words
and their structures

and see how the structures
of words affect sentences.

Some say the place to go is to work
on the structure of sentences

and worry later about
what the words mean.

Some people say unless you
look at the role of language

in conversations, in stories

and longer stretches of discourse,

you'll never really understand
what language is about.

Now, in a sense, of course,
they're all right.

(Frederick) We can't cut open
the brain and look at structures

that are involved in visual
perception or in memory,

but we do have language.

We do have something almost physical.

We have the record of what people say

and we can analyze that as data.

So linguistics provides us with
the most accessible window

into the human mind.

(Jerry) We have this remarkable system

that allows us to choose a form of words

corresponding to the thought
that we want to express.

And somehow, it's a system
we manage to

learn within a very short period of time,

if we're a child in a language community,

and that we manage to access,

to exploit both from the point
of view of the speaker

and from the point of view of the hearer,

instantaneously, easily, unconsciously,

with no sense of effort.

(Lila) So if you wanted to ask,
"What's the answer to the question?

Is language simple or
is language complex?"

It's simple for those creatures who use it.

That is, the human brain
is naturally evolved

so that it uses a system of
this apparently complex sort

in a very simple way.

(male) If a child is in an environment

in which language interactions
are proceeding,

that language will grow
in the child's mind

but very much in the manner of
other aspects of physical growth.

(female) I take it as the current
task of linguistics

to ask the question about language:

how much of it is built in
and in what way?

And how much of it is
and must be learned

by exposure to the environment
of speaking people?

(male) A question for the next in
our series on the human language:

how do children acquire language
without seeming to learn it?

Part 2: Playing the Language Game.