On Language

In 1989 Lars Larson was the chief engineer of the M/V Sea Isle City which, until a few months earlier, had been known to it’s former Pilipino crew (and the Iranian militants that made a sport of bombing it with Chinese-made Silkworm missiles) as the Um Al Materdem. In fact the name still clung to the bow, welded in Arabic and hidden beneath a fresh coat of black paint. Lars was Norwegian, the ship was Kuwaiti, the ships new crew was American, who were working for a Texas based company with offices in Maryland that was hired by the U.S. government, who were helping the Kuwait government get their oil out of the Persian Gulf. The ship had just arrived at an Italian port after having spent several months making repairs in Bahrain, then taking cargo in Kuwait and Saudi. Lars was not a native English speaker. Nor was Francesco, the Italian First assistant engineer, Lars immediate subordinate. One might think that being Italian might have been to Francesco’s advantage as we had just arrived in Italy, but since Francesco would spend the majority of his time aboard ship talking to the U.S. Coast Guard officer that was waiting to inspect the ship, his fluency in Italian was of no great relief. But as things turned out, it was Lars and Francesco using their particular English vernacular that made the inspection successful. Capt. Haynes was and old salt in the worst possible way, and knowing full well that his ship would not pass inspection (there was still monstrous problems with the engines and systems for pumping cargo), his only option was to create a language barrier that might consternate the inspector to the point of hopelessness. Lars and Francesco were oblivious to the captain’s plan and were, in fact, quite proud to have been asked by the captain to supervise the inspection.
And so it was that on a bright blue Mediterranean morning that the U.S. Coast Guard was met at the gangway of an 81,000 gross ton oil tanker by the engineering equivalent of doppelgänger Mr. Magoos’. Non-fluent English speaking Mr. Magoos’; the worst kind. It was a brilliant move by the captain, and worked perfectly since both Lars and Francesco had such thick and different accents that trying to decipher their individual brands of “English” was akin to trying to rub your belly and pat the top of your head… with your feet, while simultaneously trying to fend off an attacking mountain gorilla using submissive body posture; it was not possible.Top of Form
Bottom of Form
Up to that point the only phrase that I personally could understand Lars say with any certainty was “Yoo gutta keip Vorking”, which meant that I had to ‘keep working’. Other than that there was liberal use of contextual information to decipher what he was trying to tell me. This was complicated by the sheer volume level in the engine room. Francesco was no easier to understand. While his tone was very different (he was more subtle and passive in his approach then Lars who was sometimes compared to a caveman), it was no less intelligible. “Jyacee, Whyya yu pica dees uppa for to bea putting ‘way likka eyasie nice plac”, which would mean ‘J, pick up these tools and put them away, I like a clean shop space’. It had taken months to figure each out individually, no one was going to decode them in a day.
Together the three men went about the ship inspecting, and when there was a question from the Coast Guard Officer you would see the frustration wash over his face as both Lars and Francesco began their simultaneous response, yelling above the din in their distinctive English vernaculars, and gesticulating impressively in their native ‘hand’ (as it turns out there may be as many different hand gesture dialects as there are languages). Progress was slow. In fact one cannot really call it progress; it was more an exercise in futility. And futility was, in fact, just what the captain had hoped for.
Somewhere in the early afternoon I was told that ‘the Chief’ needed me out on deck. I wiped up the oil from machines that I’d been working on and headed up the ladders that lead to the main deck level. Any reason to get out of the engine room spaces was fine with me. I found the Chief (Lars), Francesco and the bewildered Coast Guard officer standing out near the ‘dog-house’ at mid-ship.
“Chief” I said, “What do you need?”
“Yu havta meesur all oV the Fiya-canns, all oft thm. Evin in-da haus.”
“Measure the fire extinguishers?”
“Ya. Dos wha dy say, no? Meesur dem. GO!”
Lars and I had an understanding; he would tell me what to do, I would repeat it as a question to make sure I understood, he would get mad because I was asking questions, then I would go do whatever it was I understood he wanted. I’d learned very quickly not to question his motive for wanting something done, that was a BIG mistake, but as long as I kept to just repeating the command for clarification I was safe. He wanted me to measure all of the fire extinguishers on the ship, so I would measure them.
I got a measuring tape and a clip board and began my rounds. There are a lot of fire extinguishers on a super-tanker, as one may well imagine. Fire is by far the most frightening prospect to mariners (with the possible exception of gunfire or pirates). Combine the threat of fire with highly volatile petrochemicals and petroleum distillates (we were carrying 52 million gallons of Naphtha at the time) and fire paranoia goes through the roof. I went over every deck, every room, every passageway and companionway. I found places on that ship that I hadn’t known existed, and I cataloged the size of every fire extinguisher I found. It took over three hours to complete the task. When finished I found the Chief, he was out on the deck alone trying to straighten some random bent piece of steel with his bare hands (unsuccessfully).
“Chief” I said, “I measured everything like you asked. There are two different sizes of fire extinguisher aboard, one is 14 inches tall, the other is 17 inches. There are 47 of the 14”, and 72 of the 17”. One of the fire extinguisher holders is empty.”
“Tha-is awl? da-is weeird. Ah yu suure?”
“Yes. Positive. I am certain of it”
“Zwery sTrainge. The Cose-Gaad man say one wuz Shorter than ress”
“One was shorter?”
“YA. Dos wha dy say, no?”
“Shall I order a new one to replace the missing one?”
“Ya”
“Do you need me for anything else Chief?”
“No. Wery sTrainge. Yu suure? No short wun?”
“yes sir, I’m sure. None smaller then the others. ”
“O-key. Order nu wun”
When Lars had first asked me to measure all of the fire extinguishers, I had a hunch that what he was asking me to do was based in some sort of misunderstanding, but owing to the dynamic between the Chief and I there was little I could do to question his direction. In fact, my immediate response was to just do what he wanted, I hadn’t given too much thought to the directive. But as I’d spent hours tracking down all the extinguishers and measuring them I began to deduce what the context might have been. After all, who needs to measure a fire extinguisher? When I talked to the Chief after doing what he asked, my suspicion was confirmed.
The Coast Guard Officer had told the Chief that we were “one fire extinguisher short”, and Lars understood this to mean that one of them was smaller then the rest. It is a classic example of cultural linguistic idiom being interpreted literally. And that literal translation is important because it gets right at the heart of what I think is an important aspect of the cognitive foundation for language.


“Words are like sheepdogs herding ideas.” -Daniel Denett
When it comes to language, your brain processes things in two main places. There is the left half, thought to be more analytical, which processes words, and the right half, thought to be more visual and creative, which thinks in pictures. Before we learn the words for things we think primarily in pictures, but as we assign words to things we begin shifting our thought process over to the more abstract left hemisphere. Ever tried to explain to someone something you are trying to build or do but not known how to describe the object to the person? If you’re like most you stumble on the words of the description while you can imagine the object clearly in your mind. This is the right brain stepping up to the plate while the left brain flails around without an abstract value for your particular project, and most of us find it very frustrating. Learning new words for objects, things that exist physically, is easier then learning words for the values of those objects, especially comparative observational values.
Learning a spoken language comes much easier to most since the fundamental relationships are generally more organic. The related imagery, or mental representation(high level process), is primarily being processed in the right hemisphere of the brain, while the left hemisphere recognizes and associates the words as sounds, and processes syntax (low level process) (David A. Robertson) . As the representations in the speech becomes more abstract, the left side takes on more responsibility, and when we endeavor to learn a written form of language the activity in the left side really picks up. The more abstract the idea is, the more our cognitive process favors the left hemisphere.
Written forms of language are not language itself. The forms, pictures, letters, and any such aesthetic representations, are just cues that trigger the brain to associate the image of the writing with the meaning, and usually the sounds, of speech. As Daniel Denett described it, “words are like sheepdogs herding ideas” (Johnson, 2007). But the ability to interpret written words makes the whole process even more complicated since writing is visual. The right side evaluates the visual construction of the letters or words, sends it over for the left to make an association, and the left sends it back as an understood (or not) concept. The right side then conjures up the appropriate context for that concept, attaches the imagery to the concept, kicks the whole thing back over to the left side where it is turned into what would be sounds, then assembles the sounds and puts them into the context of the other words in which it appears…
…ok, so the process just gets ridiculously complicated. So much so that my attempts to simplify it here are futile. Add to it that the cognitive speed with which language can be processed exceeds the speed at which subjective awareness of sensory stimuli can be consciously perceived and you have a very fast and complicated process going on (again I am understating the case here). Subjective awareness can take up to half a second to emerge from the depths of sensory cognition in the subconscious, but language seems to know how to thwart that delay and shows an uncanny habit of processing hundreds of milliseconds faster then most other conscious tasks (Libet, 2004).
What the Coast Guard officer meant was there were too few extinguishers aboard, but what Lars and Francesco understood him to be saying was that one of the extinguishers was smaller than the others. Let’s consider it from Francesco’s perspective.
In Italian ‘extinguisher’ is estintore. ‘too few’ is troppo pochi. So troppo pochi estintori, means ‘too few extinguishers’. But that is what the C.G. officer meant, not what he said. Making the translation it is easy to assume that what Francesco must have heard was more along the lines of “uno dei extiguishers è troppo piccolo” or ‘one of the extinguishers to too small’. The trouble was with the word ‘short’. In the English vernacular it can refer to “short of the mark” which is then used as “less than enough to meet the required amount”. But such idiom rarely transcends the language barrier, so ‘short’ is translated literally into a size comparison. The language gets translated in the left side of the brain, and then gets compared to the imagery on the right side; Francesco and Lars see a tiny extinguisher. They then send me around to find the diminutive offender.
For Lars and Francesco the challenge of a second language pushes their linguistic cognition back to the left-right comparison mode. Which is not to say that when we converse in our native tongues we don’t use a global process to engage in discourse: we do. But a fluent speaker also understands the abstraction of idiom and vernacular of the context, and as such can converse in much more highly informed and fluid manner (high context). Knowing a language is not the same as knowing the culture or the context of the language (Hall, 1959).



“Thank you falettinme be mice elf” –Sly Stone
Language develops in humans as a part of growth. It is relatively spontaneous, or rather, it is a natural progression of environmental conditioning; we are surrounded by people using it, so we pick it up too. Written language is not, it is ‘derivative’ according to linguist Leonard Bloomfield. More precisely it is “a way of recording language by means of visible marks” (Crystal, 2006).
Written words don’t speak; the reader speaks the written words by way of association of the form to the idea, which in turn associates itself with a sound. By themselves words, written or spoken, have no real meaning. It is only through the association of those alphanumeric forms and audible utterances to our internal concepts that we derive any semblance of meaning from them. The real work and revelation happens behind closed doors, invisibly, inaudibly, and if everything is working correctly, automatically. If there is nothing to relate the form or the sound to, we have trouble on our hands. We have a gap, a void, and missing quotient; we don’t understand. Abstraction can be a troublesome bedfellow on the road to comprehension.
Take numbers for instance. Unlike the learning of names of tangible things, numbers are an abstraction for quantity, numbers can apply to any thing, and in many ways, but mostly they are a means of measuring something. You can even have a number of things, but the number itself is just an arbitrary associative symbol (some primitive civilizations used only 1, 2 and ‘many’, never needing to count past three). If you are building something you need to standardize your measurements, but whether or not you use standard, metric or some other invented incremental measurement technique won’t matter at all. All that matters is that you can measure things out and keep things proportionately related to one another.
If I say the word “teacup”, you probably get a brief flash of the image of a teacup in your head. You see a teacup because your right hemisphere can imagine the image of one. If I say the word “anxiety”, you probably see the word ‘anxiety’ flash through your mind. Your right hemisphere is trying to supply an image, but anxiety is not see-able, so it reverts to the image of the written word (what do illiterate people see? Do they feel the words instead of see them?) which has been constructed into an imagined sound by the left hemisphere. Numbers present a whole additional level to the abstract quality of comprehension.
If I say “twenty-four” what happens? 24. It’s just a number, all by itself. Most “see” the written form of 24 as an image, much like you’d see a number on a sports jersey. I see colors (but that’s because I’m a synesthete, and that is a whole different conversation), so I see yellow and light-blue. We have nothing to apply the number to, so we just acknowledge the concept.
But what if I said “two dozen” instead? Are you thinking eggs? Bagels? Cupcakes? I see two egg carton containers lined up end to end. Light brown cardboard ones. I’m very visual. ‘Two dozen’ carries the implication of quantity, 24 in fact, an amount of some tangible thing, so we see it that way. I am now connected to the experiential aspect of my world, recalling tangible objects to give meaning to the abstraction of numbers. Interestingly, while ‘two dozen’ only implies 24, my visualization is only an implication of the number as well, represented by only two things. But you have to think in a sensuous way in order to arrive at that imagery, numbers without context are very confusing, very abstract, much like a language can be (Abram, 1996).
Until recently, if someone had asked me to think of the square root of two I would have been at my wits end trying to come up with a number. The square root of two is what is called an irrational number; a number that cannot be expressed as a fraction without the denominator being zero. Represented as a decimal the numbers never stop, the equation never finds an end. It simply cannot be written out in the language of numbers. But it can be seen as a ratio.
As it turns out, the diagonal of a square that has an area of one unit, is equivalent to the square root of a square that has an area of two units. To help myself understand this I drew the figures out so I could see them. It helped, but I took it a step farther by making a tangible square out of folded paper.
As an abstract number, my brain revolts at the idea of an irrational number like the square root of two. But if I am able to see the proportion of which the number represents in some physical form, the difficulty vanishes; I see the number, or rather the proportion. Either way I have something to relate it to my experience of the world (of course I am then left with the question of why a ratio that is easily constructed is considered an irrational number, but such is the nature of learning the abstract qualities of a new form of written language). What my brain has just done is created associations that use both the left and right hemispheres of my brain in order to comprehend the language used to express mathematical ratios. And it works astonishingly well! I am very taken with the simple step of being able to conceptualize an irrational number that I almost look forward to learning more mathematics. Almost.
For me, understanding numbers seems to rely on my being able to place the abstraction of them into a concrete or spatial setting. Much like in language, I need to understand the comparative observational value of the abstraction I’m trying to understand before it really makes sense. Whether you are trying to conceptualize a decimal that has been calculated out to ten million places (http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/htmltest/gifcity/sqrt2.1mil), or that ‘short’ is being used to assess a quantity, without a clear idea of the context and some idea of the experiential quality for the right brain to glom on to, mistakes are bound to be made.
Lars and Francesco, a Norwegian and an Italian, misunderstood the American who informed them the number of extinguishers was not sufficient. Instead they had me, another American, looking for an extinguisher of a different size for three hours. It might have been quicker if I’d asked the Coast Guard officer in our native tongue, but despite the misunderstandings, eventually the original problem was solved. Perhaps the misunderstanding could have been avoided if we’d all just stuck to a language we all know at least a little bit about; mathematics.


Works Cited
Abram, D. (1996). The Spell of the Sensuous. New York: Vintage Books.
Crystal, D. (2006). How Language Works. New York: Overlook Press.
David A. Robertson, e. a. (Volume 11, May 2000 ). Functional Neuroanatomy of the Cognitive Process of Mapping During Discourse Comprehension. Psychological Science , 255-260.
Fulop, Sean A. ((2004). On the Logic and Learning of Language. Victoria: Trafford Publishing Gladwell, Malcolm (2005). Blink. New York: Little, Brown & Co
Hall, E. T. (1959). The Silent Language. New York: Anchor Books.
Johnson, G. (2007, August 21). Slieghts of Mind. New York Times , p. www.nytimes.com/2007/08/21...magic.html.
Libet, B. (2004). Mind Time. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Mazur, Barry (2003). Imagining Numbers. New York : Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Zoe R Hunter, Marc Brysbaert, Stefan Knecht (2007). Foveal Word Reading Requires Interhemispheric CommunicationJournal of Cognitive Neuroscience, August 2007 pp1373-1387