Did you hate studying grammar when you were in primary school? Most people, when you ask them to explain what grammar is all about, assume a dejected attitude and, with a sigh, explain how they were never very good at grammar--there were too many rules with too many exceptions, and none of them made walkin’-around sense.
Now, you might have felt that you spoke English competently, prior to setting foot in the classroom; but not competently enough for Prof. Krakenthorpe, the old grammar nazi from Project Paperclip. Within their prescriptive perspective, speech becomes a cage of arbitrary restrictions:
don’t end a sentence with a preposition;
don’t split an infinitive;
don’t use “ain’t”;
don’t say “like” all the time;
don’t use “good” instead of “well”;
don’t use “who” instead of “whom”;
don’t say “between he and I...” or “Me and my friends are...”
Don’t...
don’t...
don’t.
And if ever you were to ask why any of these forms was wrong, you’d get some variation of “it’s the best way to communicate, because it helps everyone understand each other.” In other words, “correct” grammar ensures a tyrannical uniformity of communication.
Within the standard, “correct” system, knowing grammar is memorizing a list of rules and rigidly adhering to them in speech. This view makes language knowledge something already-figured-out. It takes the play and exploration out of language right from the get-go. Because if you already know “the right way” to say something, then why would you ever want to deviate from it? Any deviations would be wrong and we don’t want to be wrong now, do we?
And so, people lose curiosity about grammar and language in general. They’re tired of having their arguments interrupted by some upstart correcting their grammar. Evoking grammar seems just a silly rhetorical trick to discredit the content of someone’s speech. Ummm, you actually misused antidisestablishmentarianism, your argument is invalid.
What if I told you that Prof Krakenthorpe and the whole line of grammar nazis--whether they be infiltrating English, or French, or Spanish, or any language whatsoever--had entirely the wrong idea? Not only are their individual grammatical rules wrong, but the whole perspective that spawned them. They are wrong in the most fundamental fashion: they do not describe reality. They are not true, nor are they beautiful.
Now, the linguist, the conlanger, the musician, the poet, the writer--hell! all the artists--are not interested in placing artificial limits on their art. They want to see it develop naturally, playfully, unimpeded. To a Linguist, you already perfectly speak your language. How you actually speak is communicatively competent and grammatically correct. And that’s what linguists are interested in. How language actually works. Language to a linguist is like a tiger to a zoologist. One learns more about tigers by observing them at a distance, in their natural habitat, than by observing them caged in a circus somewhere.
Languages are as various and variable as any living species, and you won’t get very far in understanding them if you’re always putting them in boxes. As a matter of fact, it wouldn’t be too much to say that languages are living things--and, like all life, the attitude they inspire is awe. Awe is Step Zero of the scientific method, as important as Observation. Awe is the reason why anyone would want to observe anything in the first place.
Now, when I said that you already spoke your language perfectly and grammatically correctly, I bet you had a little voice in your head go, “no, I don’t! My grammar is terrible, actually!” Tell me, little censorious voice, how did you know to say “no, I don’t” instead of
“I no don’t ”
or
“no do I not”
or
“Do no I not”
Phew! my brain actually struggled to process that last one into anything meaningful, and probably yours did too. Actually, as I was reading over them again, I noticed that I was trying to forcefully change the word order in my mind in order to make them more interpretable. I bet you couldn't give a definite reason why these sentences sound bad, but they’re definitely not acceptable. These sentences don’t mean anything. The individual words do, but the order is nonsense. Like, it’s not even necessary to go looking for a rule in some grammarbook to confirm that these are bad sentences--the rules that prohibit them are unconscious. A four-year-old could tell you that was a bad sentence. The grammar that linguists are interested in--the True Grammar--is this set of unconscious rules, used for assembling the meaningful elements of language.
The word “grammar” is related, through Old French, to the word “grimoire,” both being derived from grammaire, which designated texts written in Latin. Now a grimoire, as my fantasy nerds know, is a magical book. A book which contains incantations and spells and sigils and secrets. It is a mysterious book. A powerful book. And the Grimoire of human language is indeed mysterious and powerful.
The rules of the Language-Grimoire, inscribed upon the minds of men, are the fundamental source of humans’ infinite creativity.
Within the Language-Grimoire, whose pages are the folds of the human brain, is a special spell, with infinity coiled up inside of it. Thaumic Linguists call it recursivity--and it lets spellspeakers put one element inside another, inside another, inside another....and so on. Recursivity is expressed in nature, when the magician places two mirrors athwart each other, and an infinity of discrete images opens up, each containing a perfect copy of itself.
Recursivity lets you spin long, long yarns from a single spool.
I saw the Dragon that ate the queen who had a jewel in her head, which gave her magic powers that let her see the future, which she said was bleak, though she was talking about her own future that may have...
And you could go on reporting this extraordinary, tragic occurrence, adding phrase after phrase, till no one remembered what you started off saying--and still your sentence would be grammatically correct. Actually, let’s stop saying grammatically “correct”. Let’s say grammatically possible, which is less judgmental, and also more accurate. The point is, is that there is no upper limit. The number of possible sentences is infinite. Language is a boundless system.
Can you see now, how the linguists’ view is different fundamentally from the grammar nazi’s?
Language is rules-bound--yes-- but those rules are unconscious, rather than being explicit. And you already have perfect command of them. And the rules of language, furthermore, do not restrict its expressivity, but permit for infinite possible expressions.
The possible infinity of Language opens up a mystery in linguistic science that is the closest thing to actual magic in the primary world. It starts with the question: if languages are infinite systems, how the hell do children learn them so quickly, or at all? After all, young children have been observed to be fully fluent by age 4, regardless of their native language. They are able to produce sentences that they’ve never heard before (“kids say the darndest things!”); as well as recognize novel sentences. Despite a few errors in learning the meanings of words, children can nevertheless correctly guess the meaning and use of word from just a single example. How does this happen?
Well, it’s a difficult question, with lots of ink being spilled around it since Plato’s time. But the hypothesis I favor is the Universal Grammar hypothesis, advanced by Noam Chomsky, which maintains that humans are born equipped with an innate language processing mechanism. Now this of course doesn’t mean that humans are born speaking English or Arabic or any specific language. No, no, no. Rather, what Universal Grammar purports to explain is the ability of any human to learn any language. How would a child know that “do no I not” is a bad sentence? Because that structure was disallowed from the beginning, by magic linguistic bind-runes, inscribed on the FOXP2 gene--thought to be responsible for language development--which limit the possible structures of a language. This hypothesis predicts deep structural similarities between languages as disparate as French and Chinese (e.g. all languages have something that works like pronouns; no language incorporates a labial-lingual trill (the “raspberry”) into their phonetic inventory).
Within the Universal Grammar hypothesis, humans’ ability to use language, is like the Sorcerer’s ability to use magic in D&D. Unlike the Wizard, who gains mastery over magic through explicit study, the sorcerer has their magical gift foisted upon them at birth, and they later learn to control that gift through practice. A newbie storm sorcerer, letting off unintentional gusts of hail, could choose to train with a monk and learn a really controlled kind of storm magic; or with a barbarian, and learn how to outshout the tempest. In either case, it’s still storm sorcery, but the output it gives will differ depending on the instructional input. This is exactly* how humans acquire language. They are born with an unrefined and indistinct innate ability, which later gets refined into a specific language, through the input of their caretakers and community. So a child could be born into a Nahuatl-speaking family or a Maasai-speaking family, and still become proficient in their respective languages in 4 years, because of their innate Universal Grimoire.
Running experiments to figure out what exactly is written in the Language-Grimoire, is linguists’ driving motivation. That is to say, what is the psychological content of Universal Grammar? How many grimoirical rules are required to make a language? What are the lower bounds? The upper limits? How does Universal Grammar connect to the other parts of the mind?
Now these questions are not in any danger of being answered definitively anytime soon. They really are quite difficult. But that doesn’t mean that seeking out the answers isn’t worthwhile. Since UG is hypothesized to inform the structure of all the world’s languages, the best way to uncover its secrets is through comparison, by looking at as many as possible different languages from around the globe. Surface-level dissimilarities between languages (say at the level of word order) have been shown, through investigation, to actually be reflections of deeper commonalities, and the hope is that further researches will open up clues onto the larger operations of the mind.
Hopefully, this article helped to wrench you from grammar aporia, and fill you with the renewed enthusiasm of discovery. I hope you see that Grammar really isn’t abut rules at all. “Getting it right” is some old bullshit. As Kato Lomb, the celebrated translator reminds us
“We should learn languages because language is the only thing worth knowing even poorly.....Solely in the world of languages is the amateur of value. Well-intentioned sentences full of mistakes can still build bridges between people. Asking in broken Italian which train we are supposed to board at the Venice railway station is far from useless. Indeed, it is better to do that than to remain uncertain and silent and end up back in Budapest rather than in Milan.” (Polyglot: How I learn Languages)
And building bridges is precisely what I find most attractive about the Universal Grammar hypothesis. Hypothesizing a Universal Grammar underlying all human languages, paints a most optimistic portrait of our human connectedness. No matter how different our languages, cultures, experiences may be, I know that mutual understanding is fundamentally possible. Furthermore, a corollary of the UG hypothesis, is that I cannot fully understand my own capacity to speak, without an understanding of the speech of others, since understanding LANGUAGE depends on a composite understanding of each particular language.
And so, in the spirit of understanding through comparison, In the next article, I will compare the word-building (not world-building) processes for several different languages across the world, which should give you inspirations for your conlangs.