![Studies in the Evolution of Language
General Editors
Kathleen R. Gibson, University of Texas at Houston,
and James R. Hurford, University of Edinburgh
Published
1
The Orgins of Vowel Systems
Bart de Boer
2
The Transition to Language
Edited by Alison Wray
3
Language Evolution
Edited by Morten H. Christiansen and Simon Kirby
4
Language Origins
Evolutionary Perspectives
Edited by Maggie Tallerman
5
The Talking Ape
How Language Evolved
Robbins Burling
6
The Emergence of Speech
Pierre-Yves Oudeyer
translated by James R. Hurford
7
Why we Talk
The Evolutionary Origins of Human Communication
Jean-Louis Dessalles
translated by James Grieve
8
The Origins of Meaning
Language in the Light of Evolution 1
James R. Hurford
9
The Genesis of Grammar
Bernd Heine and Tania Kuteva
10
The Origin of Speech
Peter F. MacNeilage
11
The Prehistory of Language
Edited by Rudolf Botha and Chris Knight
12
The Cradle of Language
Edited by Rudolf Botha and Chris Knight
13
Language Complexity as an Evolving Variable
Edited by Geoffrey Sampson, David Gil, and Peter Trudgill
[For a list of books in preparation for the series, see p 310]](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/843606-250601144057-d1332746/85/Language-Complexity-As-An-Evolving-Variable-Studies-In-The-Evolution-Of-Language-Geoffrey-Sampson-7-320.jpg)
![One point worth making about this is that it is not obvious that ‘‘more
complex’’ should be equated with ‘‘more admirable’’. We all know the acro-
nym KISS, ‘‘Keep it simple, stupid’’, implying that the best systems are often
the simplest rather than the most complex ones. Whoever invented that
acronym probably was not thinking about language structure, but arguably
the principle should apply as much to our domain as to any other. We
English-speakers do not seem to spend much time yearning to use languages
more like Archi or poetic Latin.
Still, it is certainly true that the layman’s idea of language diversity was that
primitive Third World tribes had crude, simple languages, whereas the lan-
guages of Europe were precision instruments. The descriptivists were anxious
to urge that this equation just does not hold – unwritten third world gram-
mars often contain highly sophisticated structural features; and they were
surely correct in making that point.
It is worth adding that the founders of the descriptivist school seem often
to have been subtler about this than those who came after them, such as
Hockett. Edward Sapir, for instance, did not say that all languages were
equally complex – he did not believe they were, but he believed that there
was no correlation between language complexity and level of civilization:
Both simple and complex types of language . . . may be found spoken at any desired
level of cultural advance. When it comes to linguistic form, Plato walks with the
Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savages of Assam. (Sapir
[1921] 1963: 219)
Franz Boas was more knowledgeable about detailed interrelationships between
language, race, and culture than later descriptivist linguists, who tended to
focus on language alone in a more specialized way; and Boas was responsible
for the classic discussion of how Third World languages sometimes enforced
precision about intellectual categories that European languages leave vague:
In Kwakiutl this sentence [the man is sick] would have to be rendered by an expression
which would mean, in the vaguest possible form that could be given to it, deWnite man
near him invisible sick near him invisible. . . . in case the speaker had not seen the sick
person himself, he would have to express whether he knows it by hearsay or by
evidence that the person is sick, or whether he has dreamed it. (Boas [1911] 1966: 39)
But Boas did not claim, as later linguists often have done, that there was no
overall diVerence in the intellectual nature of the ideas expressed in the
languages of culturally primitive and culturally advanced societies. Boas
believed that there were important diVerences, notably that the languages of
primitive cultures tended to lack expressions for abstract ideas and to focus
A linguistic axiom challenged 5](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/843606-250601144057-d1332746/85/Language-Complexity-As-An-Evolving-Variable-Studies-In-The-Evolution-Of-Language-Geoffrey-Sampson-24-320.jpg)
![clauses, and also to Eduard Hermann’s belief (Hermann 1895) that Proto-
Indo-European probably contained no clause subordination at all.
On the electronic Linguist List, this led to a furore. From the tone of some
of what was written, it was clear that some present-day linguists did not just
factually disagree with Ong and Hermann, but passionately rejected any
possibility that their ideas might be worth considering.
This did not seem to be explainable in terms of politically correct ideology:
people who use words like ‘‘imperialism’’ or ‘‘racism’’ to condemn any
suggestion that some present-day human societies may be less sophisticated
than others are hardly likely to feel a need to defend the Jews of almost 3,000
years ago, and still less the mysterious Indo-Europeans even further back in
the past: those peoples cannot now be touched by twenty-Wrst-century neo-
imperialism. So it seemed that the generative doctrine of innate knowledge of
language creates an intellectual outlook within which it becomes just un-
thinkable that overall complexity could vary signiWcantly between language
and language, or from period to period of the historical record. The innate
cognitive machinery which is central to the generative concept of language
competence is taken to be too comprehensive to leave room for signiWcant
diVerences with respect to complexity.
6 ‘‘Some issues on which linguists can agree’’
Summing up, the idea that languages are similar in degree of complexity has
been common ground between linguists of very diVerent theoretical persua-
sions. In 1981 Richard Hudson made a well-known attempt to identify things
that linguists all agreed about, and his list turned out to be suYciently
uncontentious that the updated version of it is nowadays promulgated as
‘‘Some issues on which linguists can agree’’ on the website of the UK Higher
Education Academy. Item 2.2d on the list runs:
There is no evidence that normal human languages diVer greatly in the complexity of
their rules, or that there are any languages that are ‘‘primitive’’ in the size of their
vocabulary (or any other part of their language [sic]), however ‘‘primitive’’ their speakers
may be from a cultural point of view. (The term ‘‘normal human language’’ is meant to
exclude on the one hand artiWcial languages such as Esperanto or computer languages,
and on the other hand languages which are not used as the primary means of commu-
nication within any community, notably pidgin languages. Such languages may be
simpler than normal human languages, though this is not necessarily so.)
Echoing Hockett’s comparison of English with Fox, Hudson’s item 3.4b states:
‘‘Although English has little inXectional morphology, it has a complex syntax . . .’’
A linguistic axiom challenged 7](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/843606-250601144057-d1332746/85/Language-Complexity-As-An-Evolving-Variable-Studies-In-The-Evolution-Of-Language-Geoffrey-Sampson-26-320.jpg)
![This axiom became so well established within linguistics that writers on
other subjects have treated it as a reliable premiss. For instance, Matt Ridley’s
popular book about recent genetic discoveries, Genome, illustrates the con-
cept of instinct with a chapter uncritically retailing the gospel according to
Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker about language, and stating as an uncon-
tentious fact that ‘‘All human people speak languages of comparable gram-
matical complexity, even those isolated in the highlands of New Guinea since
the Stone Age’’ (Ridley 1999: 94). At a more academic level, the philosopher
Stephen Laurence, in a discussion of the relationship between language and
thought, writes:
there seems to be good evidence that language isn’t just [sic] a cultural artefact or
human ‘‘invention’’. For example, there is no known correlation between the existence
or complexity of language with cultural development, though we would expect there
would be if language were a cultural artefact (Laurence 1998: 211)
Laurence cites Pinker as his authority.2
7 Complexity invariance over individuals’ lifespans
So far I have discussed the existence or nonexistence of complexity diVerences
between diVerent languages: linguists either believe that no sizeable diVer-
ences exist, or that what diVerences do exist do not correlate with other
cultural features of the respective societies. That is not the only sense in
which linguists have believed in complexity invariance, though. One can
also hold that an individual’s language remains constant in complexity during
his or her lifetime.
If the period considered were to include early childhood, that would be an
absurd position: everyone knows that small children have to move through
stages of single-word utterances and then brief phrases before they begin to
use their mother tongue in the complex ways characteristic of adults. But the
generative school believe that the language acquisition period of an individ-
ual’s life is sharply separate from the period when the individual has become a
mature speaker, and that in that mature period the speaker remains in a
linguistic ‘‘steady state’’. According to Chomsky:
2 The word ‘‘just’’ in the Wrst line of the Laurence quotation seems to imply that products of
cultural evolution will be simpler than biological structures. This may well be a tacit assumption
among proponents of the ‘‘language instinct’’ concept more generally, but if so it is a baseless one. The
English legal system, for instance, with its common-law foundation overlaid by massive corpora of
statute and case law, its hierarchy of courts, its rules of evidence, arrangements for legal education,
dress codes, and so forth is certainly a product of cultural rather than biological evolution, but no-one
would describe it as simple.
8 Geoffrey Sampson](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/843606-250601144057-d1332746/85/Language-Complexity-As-An-Evolving-Variable-Studies-In-The-Evolution-Of-Language-Geoffrey-Sampson-27-320.jpg)
![children proceed through a series of cognitive states . . . [terminating in] a ‘‘steady
state’’ attained fairly early in life and not changing in signiWcant respects from that
point on. . . . Attainment of a steady state at some not-too-delayed stage of intellectual
development is presumably characteristic of ‘‘learning’’ within the range of cognitive
capacity. (N. Chomsky 1976: 119)
Chomsky’s word ‘‘presumably’’ seems to imply that he was adopting the steady-
state hypothesis because he saw it as self-evidently plausible. Yet surely, in the
sphere of day-to-day commonsense social discussion, we are all familiar with the
opposite point of view: people say ‘‘You never stop learning, do you?’’ as a truism.
And this is a case where the generative position on complexity invariance
goes well beyond what was believed by their descriptivist predecessors. Leon-
ard BloomWeld, for instance, held a view which matched the commonsense
idea rather than Chomsky’s steady-state idea:
there is no hour or day when we can say that a person has Wnished learning to speak,
but, rather, to the end of his life, the speaker keeps on doing the very things which
make up infantile language-learning. (BloomWeld 1933: 46)
8 Complexity invariance between individuals
There is a third sense in which language complexity might or might not be
invariant. Just as one can compare complexity between the languages of
separate societies, and between the languages of diVerent stages of an indi-
vidual’s life, one can also compare complexity as between the idiolects spoken
by diVerent members of a single speech community. I am not sure that the
descriptivists discussed this issue much, but the generativists have sometimes
explicitly treated complexity invariance as axiomatic at this level also:
[Grammar acquisition] is essentially independent of intelligence. . . . We know that the
grammars that are in fact constructed vary only slightly among speakers of the same
language, despite wide variations not only in intelligence but also in the conditions
under which language is acquired. (N. Chomsky 1968: 68–9)
Chomsky goes on to say that speakers may diVer in ‘‘ability to use lan-
guage’’, that is, their ‘‘performance’’ levels may diVer, but he holds that their
underlying ‘‘competence’’ is essentially uniform. Later, he wrote:
[Unlike school subjects such as physics] Grammar and common sense are acquired by
virtually everyone, eVortlessly, rapidly, in a uniform manner. . . . To a very good Wrst
approximation, individuals are indistinguishable (apart from gross deWcits and abnor-
malities) in their ability to acquire grammar. . . individuals of a given community each
acquire a cognitive structure that is. . . essentially the same as the systems acquired by
A linguistic axiom challenged 9](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/843606-250601144057-d1332746/85/Language-Complexity-As-An-Evolving-Variable-Studies-In-The-Evolution-Of-Language-Geoffrey-Sampson-28-320.jpg)
![Gil has published a series of comparisons (e.g. Gil 2005b) between the
indigenous Indonesian dialect of the island of Riau and the formal Indonesian
language used for written communication, which outsiders who study Indo-
nesian are encouraged to see as the standard language of that country. Formal
Indonesian does share many features of European languages which generative
theory sees as necessary properties of any natural language. But colloquial
Riau Indonesian does not: it fails to conform to various characteristics that
generativists describe as universal requirements. And Gil argues (if I interpret
him correctly) that part of the explanation is that oYcial, formal Indonesian
is to some extent an artiWcial construct, created in order to mirror the logical
properties of European languages.
Because the formal language has prestige, when a foreigner asks a Riau
speaker how he expresses something, the answer is likely to be an example of
formal Indonesian. But when the same speaker talks spontaneously, he will
use the very diVerent structural patterns of Riau Indonesian.
In modern political circumstances Gil’s argument is very plausible. Con-
sider the opening sentence of the United Nations Charter, which in English
contains 177 words, consisting of one main clause with three clauses at one
degree of subordination, eight clauses at two degrees of subordination, four
clauses at three degrees of subordination, and one clause at four degrees of
subordination (square brackets delimit Wnite and angle brackets delimit non-
Wnite clauses):
[We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding
generations from the scourge of war, [which twice in our lifetime has
brought untold sorrow to mankind], and to reaYrm faith in funda-
mental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the
equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to
establish conditions [under which justice and respect for the obligations
arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be
maintained], and to promote social progress and better standards of
life in larger freedom, and for these ends to practise tolerance and live
together in peace with one another as good neighbours, and to unite
our strength to maintain international peace and security, and to
ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, [that
armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest], and to
employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and
social advancement of all peoples, have resolved to combine our
eVortsto accomplish these aims].
16 Geoffrey Sampson](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/843606-250601144057-d1332746/85/Language-Complexity-As-An-Evolving-Variable-Studies-In-The-Evolution-Of-Language-Geoffrey-Sampson-35-320.jpg)
![3
On the evolution of complexity:
sometimes less is more in East
and mainland Southeast Asia
WALTER BISANG
1 Setting the stage
Recent functional typological approaches to complexity (McWhorter 2001a,
2005; Dahl 2004) deWne their Weld of research in terms of grammatical cat-
egories and rules as they are manifested in overt morphological and syntactic
structures. As will be argued in this chapter, complexity has two sides – one side
is accessible through overt morphosyntactic patterns, while the other side is
hidden and must be inferred from context. The former side is extensively
discussed in the above functional typological approaches and will be referred
to as ‘‘overt complexity’’. The latter side has been neglected in the literature.
It will be called ‘‘hidden complexity’’ and will be the main topic of this paper.
The two sides of complexity are deeply rooted in the observation that
morphosyntactic structures and their properties can never fully express the
meaning they have in a concrete speech situation. The reason for this is
related to what Levinson (2000: 6, 27–30) calls the ‘‘articulatory bottleneck’’.
Human speech encoding is by far the slowest part of speech production and
comprehension – processes like pre-articulation, parsing, and comprehension
run at a much higher speed. This bottleneck situation leads to an asymmetry
between inference and articulation, which accounts for why linguistic struc-
tures and their properties are subject to context-induced enrichment:
[I]nference is cheap, articulation expensive, and thus the design requirements are for a
system that maximizes inference. (Levinson 2000: 29)
Given this situation, linguistic structures somehow need to keep the balance
between expensive articulation or explicitness and cheap inference or economy.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/843606-250601144057-d1332746/85/Language-Complexity-As-An-Evolving-Variable-Studies-In-The-Evolution-Of-Language-Geoffrey-Sampson-53-320.jpg)
Language Complexity As An Evolving Variable Studies In The Evolution Of Language Geoffrey Sampson
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- 6. Language Complexity as an Evolving Variable
- 7. Studies in the Evolution of Language General Editors Kathleen R. Gibson, University of Texas at Houston, and James R. Hurford, University of Edinburgh Published 1 The Orgins of Vowel Systems Bart de Boer 2 The Transition to Language Edited by Alison Wray 3 Language Evolution Edited by Morten H. Christiansen and Simon Kirby 4 Language Origins Evolutionary Perspectives Edited by Maggie Tallerman 5 The Talking Ape How Language Evolved Robbins Burling 6 The Emergence of Speech Pierre-Yves Oudeyer translated by James R. Hurford 7 Why we Talk The Evolutionary Origins of Human Communication Jean-Louis Dessalles translated by James Grieve 8 The Origins of Meaning Language in the Light of Evolution 1 James R. Hurford 9 The Genesis of Grammar Bernd Heine and Tania Kuteva 10 The Origin of Speech Peter F. MacNeilage 11 The Prehistory of Language Edited by Rudolf Botha and Chris Knight 12 The Cradle of Language Edited by Rudolf Botha and Chris Knight 13 Language Complexity as an Evolving Variable Edited by Geoffrey Sampson, David Gil, and Peter Trudgill [For a list of books in preparation for the series, see p 310]
- 8. Language Complexity as an Evolving Variable Edited by GEOFFREY SAMPSON, DAVID GIL, AND PETER TRUDGILL 1
- 9. 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With oYces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York # 2009 editorial matter and organization Geoffrey Sampson, David Gil, and Peter Trudgill # 2009 the chapters their several authors The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First Published 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire ISBN 978–0–19–954521–6 (Hbk.) 978–0–19–954522–3 (Pbk.) 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
- 10. Contents Preface vii Interlinear glosses ix The contributors xii 1. A linguistic axiom challenged Geoffrey Sampson 1 2. How much grammar does it take to sail a boat? David Gil 19 3. On the evolution of complexity: sometimes less is more in East and mainland Southeast Asia Walter Bisang 34 4. Testing the assumption of complexity invariance: the case of Elfdalian and Swedish Östen Dahl 50 5. Between simplification and complexification: non-standard varieties of English around the world Benedikt Szmrecsanyi and Bernd Kortmann 64 6. Implicational hierarchies and grammatical complexity Matti Miestamo 80 7. Sociolinguistic typology and complexification Peter Trudgill 98 8. Linguistic complexity: a comprehensive definition and survey Johanna Nichols 110 9. Complexity in core argument marking and population size Kaius Sinnemäki 126 10. Oh nÓO! : a bewilderingly multifunctional Saramaccan word teaches us how a creole language develops complexity John McWhorter 141 11. Orality versus literacy as a dimension of complexity Utz Maas 164
- 11. 12. Individual differences in processing complex grammatical structures Ngoni Chipere 178 13. Origin and maintenance of clausal embedding complexity Fred Karlsson 192 14. Layering of grammar: vestiges of protosyntax in present-day languages Ljiljana Progovac 203 15. An interview with Dan Everett Geoffrey Sampson 213 16. Universals in language or cognition? Evidence from English language acquisition and from Pirahã Eugénie Stapert 230 17. ‘‘Overall complexity’’: a wild goose chase? Guy Deutscher 243 18. An efficiency theory of complexity and related phenomena John A. Hawkins 252 19. Envoi The editors 269 References 272 Index 299 vi Contents
- 12. Preface This book is the outcome of a workshop held at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, in April 2007. The workshop was convened in response to the fairly sudden emergence, in many diverse quar- ters internationally, of scepticism about a longstanding linguistic axiom – that all languages and language varieties are similar in complexity, and have been so at all times in the past. The organizers set out to assemble in one place as many as possible of those who have been questioning this axiom, so that they could thrash out how far they were genuinely discussing the same issue, what they agreed on, and where they diverged. Almost everyone invited was able to come – and the three who could not make it to Leipzig in person, Ngoni Chipere (who as a Zimbabwean encountered visa problems), Guy Deutscher, and Johanna Nichols, have nevertheless contributed in writing. The Leipzig workshop was by common consent exceptionally successful as a meeting of minds, with an intellectual fizz that will not be quickly forgotten by those who were there. Contributors represented institutions in twelve countries and a broad spectrum of discipline backgrounds, ranging for instance from Southeast Asian field anthropology (David Gil) through gen- erative linguistic theory (Ljiljana Progovac) to ancient Near Eastern philology (Guy Deutscher). Yet despite this diversity, both in the formal sessions and in the breaks, everyone was talking to each other rather than past each other. After the workshop, the editors invited a selection of the speakers to write up their material in the light of the discussions at Leipzig. (A minority of the presentations which were less closely related to the central topic are not included here.) Contributors were encouraged to pay special attention to what had emerged in the course of proceedings as common themes – these were codified by Jack Hawkins in a helpful written aide-memoire. The first of the chapters that follow was written as an attempt to survey the overall issue in its various aspects. The sequence of later chapters was chosen so as to bring together contributions which address similar topics or which can be read as responding to one another. However, there are so many overlapping relationships between the various contributions that any order- ing principle is inevitably fairly arbitrary. We should like to express our warmest thanks to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and to Bernard Comrie, Director of its
- 13. Linguistics Department, for making this workshop financially possible, and to support staff at the Institute for their help in making this such a welcoming and smoothly running occasion. We hope that the following pages will enable the reader to share not only the ideas but some of the intellectual efferves- cence that was in the air at Leipzig. G.R.S. D.G. P.T. viii Preface
- 14. Interlinear glosses Interlinear glosses for language examples in this book conform to the Leipzig Glossing Rules (for which, see www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing- rules.php). Where possible, codes for grammatical morphemes are drawn from the standard list of abbreviations shown below. Person–number com- binations are represented as 3S (third person singular), 1P (first person plural), etc.; and the categories ‘‘present participle’’, ‘‘past participle’’ are shown as PRP, PAP respectively. Other abbreviations are defined at the place where they are used. Standard abbreviations 1 first person 2 second person 3 third person a agent-like argument of canonical transitive verb abl ablative abs absolutive acc accusative adj adjective adv adverb(ial) agr agreement all allative antip antipassive appl applicative art article aux auxiliary ben benefactive caus causative clf classifier com comitative comp complementizer
- 15. compl completive cond conditional cop copula cvb converb dat dative decl declarative def definite dem demonstrative det determiner dis distal distr distributive du dual dur durative erg ergative excl exclusive f feminine foc focus fut future gen genitive imp imperative incl inclusive ind indicative indf indefinite inf infinitive ins instrumental intr intransitive ipfv imperfective irr irrealis loc locative m masculine n neuter n- non- (e.g. nsg nonsingular, npst nonpast) neg negation, negative nmlz nominalizer/nominalization x Interlinear glosses
- 16. nom nominative obj object obl oblique p patient-like argument of canonical transitive verb pass passive pfv perfective pl plural poss possessive pred predicative prf perfect prog progressive proh prohibitive prox proximal/proximate prf present pst past ptcp participle purp purposive q question particle/marker quot quotative recp reciprocal refl reflexive rel relative res resultative s single argument of canonical intransitive verb sbj subject sbjv subjunctive sg singular top topic tr transitive voc vocative Interlinear glosses xi
- 17. Notes on the contributors Walter Bisang is Professor of General and Comparative Linguistics at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz. He is editor in chief of the Zeitschrift für Sprachwis- senschaft. Ngoni Chipere is a lecturer in Language Arts in the School of Education, University of the West Indies at Cave Hill, Barbados. He is author of Understanding complex sentences (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Östen Dahl is Professor of General Linguistics at Stockholm University. His books include The growth and maintenance of linguistic complexity (John Benjamins, 2004). Guy Deutscher is an Assyriologist in the Department of Languages and Cultures of Mesopotamia and Anatolia, Leiden University. He is author of Syntactic change in Akkadian (Oxford University Press, 2000) and The unfolding of language (Heinemann, 2005). After years as a missionary in Brazil, Daniel Everett now chairs the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the Illinois State University. His book ‘Don’t sleep, there are snakes’: life and language in the Amazon jungle will appear from publishers in several countries in 2008. David Gil is a researcher in the Department of Linguistics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig. Much of his life is spent on fieldwork in remote areas of Indonesia. John Hawkins is Professor of English and Applied Linguistics at Cambridge University. His books include Efficiency and complexity in grammars (Oxford University Press, 2004). Fred Karlsson is Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Helsinki. His books in English include Finnish: an essential grammar (2nd edn, Routledge, 2008). Bernd Kortmann is a Chair Professor in the Faculty of Philology at the Albert- Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg im Breisgau. He co-edited A handbook of varieties of English (Mouton de Gruyter, 2004). Utz Maas is Professor of Education and Germanic Linguistics at Osnabrück University. His books include Sprachpolitik und politische Sprachwissenschaft (Suhrkamp, 1989). John McWhorter is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Apart from books on linguistics, including Defining creole (Oxford University Press, 2005), he has written extensively on American racial and cultural issues.
- 18. Matti Miestamo is a Research Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, and teaches linguistics at the University of Helsinki. He was the lead editor of Language complexity (John Benjamins, 2008). Johanna Nichols is a Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books include Linguistic diversity in space and time (University of Chicago Press, 1992). Ljiljana Progovac is a Professor in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Wayne StateUniversity, Detroit.She is authorof AsyntaxofSerbian(Slavica, 2005) andco-editor of The syntax of nonsententials (John Benjamins, 2006). Geoffrey Sampson is Professor of Natural Language Computing at Sussex University. His books include English for the computer (Clarendon, 1995) and The ‘language instinct’ debate (2nd edn, Continuum, 2005). Kaius Sinnemki is a Ph.D. student in the Finnish Graduate School in Language Studies and is based in Helsinki. With Miestamo and Karlsson he co-edited Language complexity (John Benjamins, 2008). EugØnie Stapert is a researcher in the Department of Linguistics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, and is working on a Manchester University doctoral thesis on the Pirahã language. Benedikt Szmrecsanyi is a member of the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg im Breisgau. He is author of Morphosyntactic persistence in spoken English (Mouton de Gruyter, 2006). Peter Trudgill is Professor Emeritus of English Linguistics, Université de Fribourg. His books include The dialects of England (Blackwell, 1990) and New-dialect formation (Edinburgh University Press, 2006). Notes on the contributors xiii
- 19. Frank Cotham cartoon from New Yorker, 28 May 2007, ID 123995
- 20. 1 A linguistic axiom challenged GEOFFREY SAMPSON 1 Background This book responds to the fact that an ideawhich ranked for many decades as an unquestioned truism of linguistics is now coming under attack from many diVerent directions. This introductory chapter sketches the history of the axiom, and goes on to draw together some of the diverse ways in which it is now under challenge. For much of the twentieth century, linguistics was strongly attached to a principle of invariance of language complexity as one of its bedrock assumptions – and not just the kind of assumption that lurks tacitly in the background, so that researchers are barely conscious of it, but one that linguists were very given to insisting on explicitly. Yet it never seemed to be an assumption that linguists oVered much justiWcation for – they appeared to believe it because they wanted to believe it, much more than because they had reasons for believing it. Then, quite suddenly at the beginning of the new century, a range of researchers began challenging the assumption, though these challenges were so diverse that people who became aware of one of them would not necessarily link it in their minds with the others, and might not even be aware of the other challenges. Linguists and non-linguists alike agree in seeing human language as the clearest mirror we have of the activities of the human mind, and as a specially important component of human culture, because it underpins most of the other components. Thus, if there is serious disagreement about whether language complexity is a universal constant or an evolving variable, that is surely a question which merits careful scrutiny. There cannot be many current topics of academicdebate which have greater general human importance than this one. 2 Complexity invariance in early twentieth-century linguistics When I Wrst studied linguistics, in the early 1960s, Noam Chomsky’s name was mentioned, but the mainstream subject as my fellow students and
- 21. I encountered it was the ‘‘descriptivist’’ tradition that had been inaugurated early in the twentieth century by Franz Boas and Leonard BloomWeld; it was exempliWed by the papers collected in Martin Joos’s anthology Readings in linguistics, which contained Joos’s famous summary of that tradition as holding ‘‘that languages can diVer from each other without limit and in unpredictable ways’’ (Joos 1957: 96). Most fundamental assumptions about language changed completely as between the descriptive linguistics of the Wrst two-thirds of the twentieth century and the generative linguistics which became inXuential from the mid- 1960s onwards. For the descriptivists, languages were part of human cultures; for the generativists, language is part of human biology – as Chomsky (1980: 134) put it, ‘‘we do not really learn language; rather, grammar grows in the mind’’. The descriptivists thought that languages could diVer from one another in any and every way, as Martin Joos said; the generativists see human beings as all speaking in essence the same language, though with minor local dialect diVerences (N. Chomsky 1991: 26). But the invariance of language complexity is an exception: this assumption is common to both descriptivists and generativists. The clearest statement that I have found occurred in Charles Hockett’s inXuential 1958 textbook A course in modern linguistics: . . . impressionistically it would seem that the total grammatical complexity of any language, counting both morphology and syntax, is about the same as that of any other. This is not surprising, since all languages have about equally complex jobs to do, and what is not done morphologically has to be done syntactically. Fox, with a more complex morphology than English, thus ought to have a somewhat simpler syntax; and this is the case. (Hockett 1958: 180–81) Although Hockett used the word ‘‘impressionistically’’ to avoid seeming to claim that he could pin precise Wgures on the language features he was quantifying, notice how strong his claim is. Like Joos, Hockett believed that languages could diVer extensively with respect to particular subsystems: e.g. Fox has complex morphology, English has simple morphology. But when one adds together the complexity derived from the separate subsystems, and if one can Wnd some way to replace ‘‘impressions’’ with concrete numbers, Hockett’s claim is that the overall total will always come out about the same. Hockett justiWes his claim by saying that ‘‘languages have about equally complex jobs to do’’, but it seems to me very diYcult to deWne the job which grammar does in a way that is speciWc enough to imply any particular prediction about grammatical complexity. If it really were so that languages varied greatly in the complexity of subsystem X, varied greatly in the complexity 2 Geoffrey Sampson
- 22. of subsystem Y, and so on, yet for all language the totals from the separate subsystems added together could be shown to come out the same, then I would not agree with Hockett in Wnding this unsurprising. To me it would feel almost like magic. 3 Apparent counterexamples And at an intuitive level it is hard to accept that the totals do always come out roughly the same. Consider for instance Archi, spoken by a thousand people in one village 2,300 metres above sea level in the Caucasus. According to Aleksandr Kibrik (1998), an Archi verb can inXect into any of about 1.5 million contrasting forms. English is said to be simple morphologically but more complex syntactically than some languages; but how much syntactic com- plexity would it take to balance the morphology of Archi? – and does English truly have that complex a syntax? Relative to some languages I know, English syntax as well as English morphology seems to be on the simple side. Or consider the Latin of classical poetry, which is presumably a variety of language as valid for linguists’ consideration as any other. Not only did classical Latin in general have a far richer morphology than any modern Western European language, but, in poetry, one had the extraordinary situation whereby the words of a sentence could be permuted almost randomly out of their logical hierarchy, so that Horace could write a verse such as (Odes Book I, XXII): namque me silva lupus in Sabina, dum meam canto Lalagen et ultra terminum curis vagor expeditis, fugit inermem which means something like: for a wolf Xees from me while, unarmed, I sing about my Lalage and wander, cares banished, in the Sabine woods beyond my boundary but expresses it in the sequence: for me woods a wolf in the Sabine, while my I sing about Lalage and beyond my boundary cares wander banished, Xees from unarmed We know, of course, that languages with extensive case marking, such as Latin, tend to be free word order languages. But it seems to me that what linguists normally mean by ‘‘free word order’’ is really free constituent order – the constituents of a logical unit at any level can appear in any order, when case endings show their respective roles within the higher-level unit, but the A linguistic axiom challenged 3
- 23. expectation is that (with limited exceptions) the logical units will be kept together as physical units. In Latin poetry that expectation is comprehensively Xouted, creating highly complex relationships (Fig. 1.1) between the physical text and the sense structure it encodes.1 4 Ideological motives For the descriptivist school, I believe the assumption of invariance of total language complexity as between diVerent languages was motivated largely by ideological considerations. The reason why linguistics was worth studying, for many descriptivists, was that it helped to demonstrate that ‘‘all men are brothers’’ – Mankind is not divided into a group of civilized nations or races who think and speak in subtle and complex ways, and another group of primitive societies with crudely simple languages. They assumed that more complex languages would be more admirable languages, and they wanted to urge that the unwritten languages of the third world were fully as complex as the well-known European languages, indeed the third world languages often contained subtleties of expression having no parallel in European languages. 1 In the example, the logical constituency of the Latin original can be inferred straightforwardly from that of my English translation, except that inermem, ‘‘unarmed’’, belongs in the original to the main rather than the subordinate clause – a more literal translation would run ‘‘. . . Xees from unarmed me . . .’’. namque for a wolf flees from me while, unarmed, I sing about my Lalage and wander, cares banished, in the Sabine woods beyond my boundary me silva lupus in Sabina, dum meam canto Lalagen et ultra terminum curis vagor expeditis, fugit inermem Fig. 1.1. Text-sense relationships in a verse of Horace 4 Geoffrey Sampson
- 24. One point worth making about this is that it is not obvious that ‘‘more complex’’ should be equated with ‘‘more admirable’’. We all know the acro- nym KISS, ‘‘Keep it simple, stupid’’, implying that the best systems are often the simplest rather than the most complex ones. Whoever invented that acronym probably was not thinking about language structure, but arguably the principle should apply as much to our domain as to any other. We English-speakers do not seem to spend much time yearning to use languages more like Archi or poetic Latin. Still, it is certainly true that the layman’s idea of language diversity was that primitive Third World tribes had crude, simple languages, whereas the lan- guages of Europe were precision instruments. The descriptivists were anxious to urge that this equation just does not hold – unwritten third world gram- mars often contain highly sophisticated structural features; and they were surely correct in making that point. It is worth adding that the founders of the descriptivist school seem often to have been subtler about this than those who came after them, such as Hockett. Edward Sapir, for instance, did not say that all languages were equally complex – he did not believe they were, but he believed that there was no correlation between language complexity and level of civilization: Both simple and complex types of language . . . may be found spoken at any desired level of cultural advance. When it comes to linguistic form, Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savages of Assam. (Sapir [1921] 1963: 219) Franz Boas was more knowledgeable about detailed interrelationships between language, race, and culture than later descriptivist linguists, who tended to focus on language alone in a more specialized way; and Boas was responsible for the classic discussion of how Third World languages sometimes enforced precision about intellectual categories that European languages leave vague: In Kwakiutl this sentence [the man is sick] would have to be rendered by an expression which would mean, in the vaguest possible form that could be given to it, deWnite man near him invisible sick near him invisible. . . . in case the speaker had not seen the sick person himself, he would have to express whether he knows it by hearsay or by evidence that the person is sick, or whether he has dreamed it. (Boas [1911] 1966: 39) But Boas did not claim, as later linguists often have done, that there was no overall diVerence in the intellectual nature of the ideas expressed in the languages of culturally primitive and culturally advanced societies. Boas believed that there were important diVerences, notably that the languages of primitive cultures tended to lack expressions for abstract ideas and to focus A linguistic axiom challenged 5
- 25. almost exclusively on concrete things, but he wanted to say that this was because life in a primitive society gave people little practical need to think about abstractions, and whenever the need did arise, languages would quickly be adapted accordingly: Primitive man . . . is not in the habit of discussing abstract ideas. His interests center around the occupations of his daily life . . . (p. 60) . . . the language alone would not prevent a people from advancing to more generalized forms of thinking if the general state of their culture should require expression of such thought;. . . the language would be moulded rather by the cultural state. (p. 63) 5 Complexity invariance and generative linguistics If we come forward to the generative linguistics of the last forty-odd years, we Wnd that linguists are no longer interested in discussing whether language structure reXects a society’s cultural level, because generative linguists do not see language structure as an aspect of human culture. Except for minor details, they believe it is determined by human biology, and in consequence there is no question of some languages being structurally more complex than other languages – in essence they are all structurally identical to one another. Of course there are some parameters which are set diVerently in diVerent languages: adjectives precede nouns in English but follow nouns in French. But choice of parameter settings is a matter of detail that speciWes how an individual language expresses a universal range of logical distinctions – it does not allow for languages to diVer from one another with respect to the overall complexity of the set of distinctions expressed, and it does not admit any historical evolution with respect to that complexity. According to Ray Jack- endoV (1993: 32), ‘‘the earliest written documents already display the full expressive variety and grammatical complexity of modern languages’’. I have good reason to know that the generativists are attached to that assumption, after experiencing the reception that was given to my 1997 book Educating Eve, written as an answer to Steven Pinker’s The language instinct. Pinker deployed many diVerent arguments to persuade his readers of the reality of a biologically inbuilt ‘‘language instinct’’, and my book set out to refute each argument separately. I thought my book might be somewhat controversial – I intended it to be controversial; but I had not foreseen the extent to which the controversy would focus on one particular point, which was not specially central either in my book or in Pinker’s. I argued against Ray JackendoV’s claim just quoted by referring to Walter Ong’s (1982) discussion of the way that Biblical Hebrew made strikingly little use of subordinate 6 Geoffrey Sampson
- 26. clauses, and also to Eduard Hermann’s belief (Hermann 1895) that Proto- Indo-European probably contained no clause subordination at all. On the electronic Linguist List, this led to a furore. From the tone of some of what was written, it was clear that some present-day linguists did not just factually disagree with Ong and Hermann, but passionately rejected any possibility that their ideas might be worth considering. This did not seem to be explainable in terms of politically correct ideology: people who use words like ‘‘imperialism’’ or ‘‘racism’’ to condemn any suggestion that some present-day human societies may be less sophisticated than others are hardly likely to feel a need to defend the Jews of almost 3,000 years ago, and still less the mysterious Indo-Europeans even further back in the past: those peoples cannot now be touched by twenty-Wrst-century neo- imperialism. So it seemed that the generative doctrine of innate knowledge of language creates an intellectual outlook within which it becomes just un- thinkable that overall complexity could vary signiWcantly between language and language, or from period to period of the historical record. The innate cognitive machinery which is central to the generative concept of language competence is taken to be too comprehensive to leave room for signiWcant diVerences with respect to complexity. 6 ‘‘Some issues on which linguists can agree’’ Summing up, the idea that languages are similar in degree of complexity has been common ground between linguists of very diVerent theoretical persua- sions. In 1981 Richard Hudson made a well-known attempt to identify things that linguists all agreed about, and his list turned out to be suYciently uncontentious that the updated version of it is nowadays promulgated as ‘‘Some issues on which linguists can agree’’ on the website of the UK Higher Education Academy. Item 2.2d on the list runs: There is no evidence that normal human languages diVer greatly in the complexity of their rules, or that there are any languages that are ‘‘primitive’’ in the size of their vocabulary (or any other part of their language [sic]), however ‘‘primitive’’ their speakers may be from a cultural point of view. (The term ‘‘normal human language’’ is meant to exclude on the one hand artiWcial languages such as Esperanto or computer languages, and on the other hand languages which are not used as the primary means of commu- nication within any community, notably pidgin languages. Such languages may be simpler than normal human languages, though this is not necessarily so.) Echoing Hockett’s comparison of English with Fox, Hudson’s item 3.4b states: ‘‘Although English has little inXectional morphology, it has a complex syntax . . .’’ A linguistic axiom challenged 7
- 27. This axiom became so well established within linguistics that writers on other subjects have treated it as a reliable premiss. For instance, Matt Ridley’s popular book about recent genetic discoveries, Genome, illustrates the con- cept of instinct with a chapter uncritically retailing the gospel according to Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker about language, and stating as an uncon- tentious fact that ‘‘All human people speak languages of comparable gram- matical complexity, even those isolated in the highlands of New Guinea since the Stone Age’’ (Ridley 1999: 94). At a more academic level, the philosopher Stephen Laurence, in a discussion of the relationship between language and thought, writes: there seems to be good evidence that language isn’t just [sic] a cultural artefact or human ‘‘invention’’. For example, there is no known correlation between the existence or complexity of language with cultural development, though we would expect there would be if language were a cultural artefact (Laurence 1998: 211) Laurence cites Pinker as his authority.2 7 Complexity invariance over individuals’ lifespans So far I have discussed the existence or nonexistence of complexity diVerences between diVerent languages: linguists either believe that no sizeable diVer- ences exist, or that what diVerences do exist do not correlate with other cultural features of the respective societies. That is not the only sense in which linguists have believed in complexity invariance, though. One can also hold that an individual’s language remains constant in complexity during his or her lifetime. If the period considered were to include early childhood, that would be an absurd position: everyone knows that small children have to move through stages of single-word utterances and then brief phrases before they begin to use their mother tongue in the complex ways characteristic of adults. But the generative school believe that the language acquisition period of an individ- ual’s life is sharply separate from the period when the individual has become a mature speaker, and that in that mature period the speaker remains in a linguistic ‘‘steady state’’. According to Chomsky: 2 The word ‘‘just’’ in the Wrst line of the Laurence quotation seems to imply that products of cultural evolution will be simpler than biological structures. This may well be a tacit assumption among proponents of the ‘‘language instinct’’ concept more generally, but if so it is a baseless one. The English legal system, for instance, with its common-law foundation overlaid by massive corpora of statute and case law, its hierarchy of courts, its rules of evidence, arrangements for legal education, dress codes, and so forth is certainly a product of cultural rather than biological evolution, but no-one would describe it as simple. 8 Geoffrey Sampson
- 28. children proceed through a series of cognitive states . . . [terminating in] a ‘‘steady state’’ attained fairly early in life and not changing in signiWcant respects from that point on. . . . Attainment of a steady state at some not-too-delayed stage of intellectual development is presumably characteristic of ‘‘learning’’ within the range of cognitive capacity. (N. Chomsky 1976: 119) Chomsky’s word ‘‘presumably’’ seems to imply that he was adopting the steady- state hypothesis because he saw it as self-evidently plausible. Yet surely, in the sphere of day-to-day commonsense social discussion, we are all familiar with the opposite point of view: people say ‘‘You never stop learning, do you?’’ as a truism. And this is a case where the generative position on complexity invariance goes well beyond what was believed by their descriptivist predecessors. Leon- ard BloomWeld, for instance, held a view which matched the commonsense idea rather than Chomsky’s steady-state idea: there is no hour or day when we can say that a person has Wnished learning to speak, but, rather, to the end of his life, the speaker keeps on doing the very things which make up infantile language-learning. (BloomWeld 1933: 46) 8 Complexity invariance between individuals There is a third sense in which language complexity might or might not be invariant. Just as one can compare complexity between the languages of separate societies, and between the languages of diVerent stages of an indi- vidual’s life, one can also compare complexity as between the idiolects spoken by diVerent members of a single speech community. I am not sure that the descriptivists discussed this issue much, but the generativists have sometimes explicitly treated complexity invariance as axiomatic at this level also: [Grammar acquisition] is essentially independent of intelligence. . . . We know that the grammars that are in fact constructed vary only slightly among speakers of the same language, despite wide variations not only in intelligence but also in the conditions under which language is acquired. (N. Chomsky 1968: 68–9) Chomsky goes on to say that speakers may diVer in ‘‘ability to use lan- guage’’, that is, their ‘‘performance’’ levels may diVer, but he holds that their underlying ‘‘competence’’ is essentially uniform. Later, he wrote: [Unlike school subjects such as physics] Grammar and common sense are acquired by virtually everyone, eVortlessly, rapidly, in a uniform manner. . . . To a very good Wrst approximation, individuals are indistinguishable (apart from gross deWcits and abnor- malities) in their ability to acquire grammar. . . individuals of a given community each acquire a cognitive structure that is. . . essentially the same as the systems acquired by A linguistic axiom challenged 9
- 29. others. Knowledge of physics, on the other hand, is acquired selectively. . . . It is not quickly and uniformly attained as a steady state . . . (N. Chomsky 1976: 144) In most areas of human culture, we take for granted that some individual members of society will acquire deeper and richer patterns of ability than others, whether because of diVerences in native capacity, diVerent learning opportun- ities, diVerent tastes and interests, or all of these. Language, though, is taken to be diVerent: unless we suVer from some gross disability such as profound deafness, then (according to Chomsky and other generativists) irrespective of degrees of native wit and particular tastes and formative backgrounds we grow up essentially indistinguishable with respect to linguistic competence. Admittedly, on at least one occasion Chomsky retreated fairly dramatically from this assumption of uniformity between individuals. Pressed on the point by Seymour Papert at a 1975 conference, Chomsky made remarks which seemed Xatly to contradict the quotation given above (Piattelli-Palmarini 1980: 175–6). But the consensus among generative linguists has been for linguistic uniformity between individuals, and few generativists have noticed or given any weight to what Chomsky said to Papert on a single occasion in 1975. When Ngoni Chipere decided to work on native-speaker variations in syntactic competence for his MA thesis, he tells us that his supervisor warned him that it was a bad career move if he hoped to get published, and he found that ‘‘a strong mixture of ideology and theoretical objections has created a powerful taboo on the subject of individual diVerences’’, so that ‘‘experimental evidence of such diVerences has been eVectively ignored for the last forty years’’ (Chipere 2003: xv, 5). 9 Diverse challenges to the axiom Now let us consider some of the ways in which the consensus has recently been challenged. I cannot pretend to survey developments comprehensively, and many of the challengers will be speaking for themselves in later chapters. But it is worth listing some of the publications which Wrst showed that the constant-complexity axiom was no longer axiomatic, in order to demonstrate that it is not just one facet of this consensus that is now being questioned or contradicted: every facet is being challenged simultaneously. (For further references that I have no room to discuss here, see Karlsson et al. 2008.) 10 Complexity growth in language history For me, as it happened, the Wrst item that showed me that my private doubts about complexity invariance were not just an eccentric personal heresy but a 10 Geoffrey Sampson
- 30. topic open to serious, painstaking scholarly research was Guy Deutscher’s year-2000 book Syntactic change in Akkadian. Akkadian is one of the earliest languages to have been reduced to writing, and Deutscher claims that if one looks at the earliest recorded stages of Akkadian one Wnds a complete absence of Wnite complement clauses. What’s more, this is not just a matter of the surviving records happening not to include examples of recursive structures that did exist in speech; Deutscher shows that if we inspect the 2,000-year history of Akkadian, we see complement clauses gradually developing out of simpler, non-recursive structures which did exist in the early records. And Deutscher argues that this development was visibly a response to new com- municative needs arising in Babylonian society. That is as direct a refutation as there could be of Ray JackendoV’s statement that ‘‘the earliest written documents already display the full expressive variety and grammatical complexity of modern languages’’. I do not know what evidence JackendoV thought he had for his claim; he quoted none. It seemed to me that we had an aprioristic ideological position from JackendoV being contradicted by a position based on hard, detailed evidence from Deutscher. This was particularly striking to me because of the Linguist List controversy I had found myself embroiled with. I had quoted other writers on Biblical Hebrew and Proto-Indo-European, and I was not qualiWed to pursue the controversy from my own knowledge, because I have not got the necessary expertise in those languages. One man who knew Biblical Hebrew well told me that Walter Ong, and therefore I also, had exaggerated the extent to which that language lacked clause subordination. But I have not encountered anyone querying the solidity of Deutscher’s analysis of Akkadian. If the complexity invariance axiom is understood as absolutely as Stephen Laurence expressed it in the passage I quoted in section 6 above, it was never tenable in the Wrst place. For instance, even the mainstream generative linguists Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, in their well-known cross-linguistic study of colour vocabularies, recognized that ‘‘languages add basic color terms as the peoples who speak them become technologically and culturally more complex’’ (Berlin and Kay 1969: 150), in other words there is a correl- ation between this aspect of language complexity and cultural development. But vocabulary size was not seen by linguists as an ideologically charged aspect of language complexity. Grammatical structure was, so Deutscher was contradicting a signiWcant article of faith. The way that linguists were muddling evidence with ideology was under- lined by a book that appeared in English just before the turn of the century: Louis-Jean Calvet’s Language wars and linguistic politics (a 1998 translation of a French original published in 1987). You could not Wnd a doughtier enemy of A linguistic axiom challenged 11
- 31. ‘‘linguistic imperialism’’ than Calvet; but, coming from a separate national background, his conception of what anti-imperialism requires us to believe about language structure turned out to diVer from the consensus among English-speaking linguists. One passage (chapter 9) in his book, based on a 1983 doctoral dissertation by Elisabeth Michenot, discusses the South Ameri- can language Quechua, and how it is being deformed through the inXuence of Spanish. According to Calvet, the Quechua of rural areas, free from Spanish contamination, has very little clause subordination; the ‘‘oYcial’’ Quechua of the towns has adopted a richly recursive system of clause subordination similar to Spanish or English. Many American or British linguists might take Calvet’s statement about rural Quechua as a shocking suggestion that this peasant society uses a crudely simple language; they would want to insist that rural Quechua speakers have recursive structures at their disposal even if they rarely use them. For Calvet, the scenario was a case of domineering European culture deforming the structural properties which can still be observed in Quechua where it is free from imperialist contamination. I do not doubt the sincerity of any of these linguists’ ideological commitments; but surely it is clear that we need to establish the facts about variation in structural complexity, before it is reasonable to move on to debating their ideological implications? 11 DiVerences among individuals’ levels of linguistic competence I have already mentioned Ngoni Chipere’s 2003 book Understanding complex sentences. Chipere sets out from a Wnding by the scholar who was his MA supervisor, Ewa Da ˛browska (1997), that adult members of a speech community diVer in their ability to deal with syntactic complexity. Chipere quotes the English example: The doctor knows that the fact that taking care of himself is necessary surprises Tom. The grammatical structure here is moderately complicated, but any generative grammarian would unquestionably agree that it is a well-formed example of English. Indeed, the grammar is less tangled than plenty of prose which is in everyday use in written English. But Da ˛browska found that native speakers’ ability to understand examples like this varied fairly dramatically. When she asked participants in her experiment to answer simple comprehension questions . . . she found that university lecturers performed better than undergradu- ates, who, in turn, performed better than cleaners and porters, most of whom completely failed to answer the questions correctly. (Chipere 2003: 2) 12 Geoffrey Sampson
- 32. What is more, when Chipere carried out similar experiments, he found, unexpectedly, that post-graduate students who were not native speakers of English performed better than native English cleaners and porters and, in some respects, even performed better than native English post-graduates. Presumably this was because non-native speakers actually learn the grammatical rules of English, whereas explicit grammatical instruction has not been considered necessary for native speakers . . . (Chipere 2003: 3) If our mother tongue is simply part of our culture, which we learn using the same general ability to learn complicated things that we use to learn to play chess or keep accounts or program computers, then it is entirely unsurprising that brighter individuals learn their mother tongue rather better than individuals who are less intelligent, and even that people who go through explicit language training may learn a language better than individuals who are born into the relevant speech community and just pick their mother tongue up as they go along. The linguistic consensus has been that mother tongue acquisition is a separate issue. According to the generativists, ‘‘we do not really learn lan- guage’’, using general learning abilities; ‘‘rather, grammar grows in the mind.’’ Descriptivist linguists did not believe that, but they did see native speaker mastery as the deWnitive measure of language ability. For many twentieth- century linguists, descriptivist or generativist, I believe it would simply not have made sense to suggest that a non-native speaker might be better at a language than a native speaker. Native speaker ability was the standard; to say that someone knew a language better than its native speakers would be like saying that one had a ruler which was more precisely one metre long than the standard metre, in the days when that was an actual metal bar. However, in connection with syntactic complexity there are quite natural ways to quantify language ability independently of the particular level of ability possessed by particular native speakers, and in those terms it is evidently not axiomatic that mother tongue speakers are better at their own languages than everyone else. 12 Complexity growth during individuals’ lifetimes The minor contribution I made myself to this process of challenging the linguistic consensus related to the idea of complexity invariance over indi- viduals’ lifetimes. It concerned what some are calling structural complexity as opposed to system complexity: complexity not in the sense of richness of the set of rules deWning a speaker’s language, but in the sense of how many cycles of recursion speakers produce when the rules they use are recursive. A linguistic axiom challenged 13
- 33. The British National Corpus contains transcriptions of spontaneous speech by a cross-section of the British population. I took a subset and looked at how the average complexity of utterances, in terms of the incidence of clause subordination, related to the kinds of people the speakers were (Sampson 2001). It is well known that Basil Bernstein (1971) claimed to Wnd a correlation between structural complexity and social class, though by present-day stand- ards his evidence seems quite weak. I did not Wnd a correlation of that sort (the BNC data on social class are in any case not very reliable); but what I did Wnd, to my considerable surprise, was a correlation with age. We would expect that small children use simpler grammar than adults, and in the BNC data they did. But I had not expected to Wnd that structural complexity goes on growing, long after the generativists’ putative steady state has set in. Forty-year-olds use, on average, more complex structures than thirty-year-olds. People over sixty use more complex structures than people in their forties and Wfties. Before I looked at the data, I would conWdently have predicted that we would not Wnd anything like that. 13 New versus old and big versus small languages Meanwhile, John McWhorter moved the issue about some languages being simpler than others in an interesting new direction, by arguing not only that new languages are simpler than old ones, but that big languages tend to be simpler than small ones. Everybody agrees that pidgins are simpler than established, mother tongue languages; but the consensus has been that once a pidgin acquires native speakers it turns into something diVerent in kind, a creole, and creoles are said to be similar to any other languages in their inherent properties. Only their past history is ‘‘special’’. McWhorter (2001a) proposed a metric for measuring language complexity, and he claimed that, in terms of his metric, creoles are commonly simpler than ‘‘old’’ languages. He came in for a lot of Xak (e.g. DeGraV 2001) from people who objected to the suggestion that politically powerless groups might speak languages which in some sense lack the full sophistication of European languages. But, perhaps even more interestingly, McWhorter has also argued (e.g. 2001b) that English, and other languages of large and successful civilizations, tend to be simpler than languages used by small communities and rarely learned by outsiders. Indeed, similar ideas were already being expressed by Peter Trudgill well before the turn of the century (e.g. Trudgill 1989). It possibly requires the insularity of a remote, impoverished village community 14 Geoffrey Sampson
- 34. to evolve and maintain the more baroque language structures that linguists have encountered. Perhaps Archi not only is a language of the high Caucasus but could only be a language of a place like that. 14 An unusually simple present-day language Possibly the most transgressive work of all has been Dan Everett’s description of the Pirahã language of the southern Amazon basin (Everett 2005). Early Akka- dian, according to Guy Deutscher, lacked complement clauses, but it did have some clause subordination. Pirahã in our own time, as Everett describes it, has no clause subordination at all, indeed it has no grammatical embedding of any kind, and in other ways too it sounds astonishingly crude as an intellectual medium. For instance, Pirahã has no quantiWer words, comparable to all, some, or most in English; and it has no number words at all – even ‘‘one, two, many’’ is a stage of mathematical sophistication outside the ken of the Pirahã. If the generativists were right to claim that human biology guarantees that all natural languages must be cut to a common pattern, then Pirahã as Dan Everett describes it surely could not be a natural human language. (It is reasonable to include the proviso about correctness – faced with such re- markable material, we must bear in mind that we are dealing with one fallible scholar’s interpretations.) Despite the oddity of their language, though, the Pirahã are certainly members of our species. The diVerence between Pirahã and better-known languages is a cultural diVerence, not a biological diVer- ence, and in the cultural sphere we expect some systems to be simpler than others. Nobody is surprised if symphonic music has richer structure than early mediaeval music, or if the present-day law of England requires many more books to deWne it than the Anglo-Saxon common law out of which it evolved. Cultural institutions standardly evolve in complexity over time, often becoming more complex, sometimes being simpliWed. But we have not been accustomed to thinking that way about language. 15 Language ‘‘universals’’ as products of cultural inXuence Finally, David Gil documents a point about isomorphism between exotic and European languages. Where non-Indo-European languages of distant cultures in our own time do seem to be structurally more or less isomorphic with European languages, this is not necessarily evidence for biological mechanisms which cause all human languages to conform to a common pattern. It may instead merely show that the ‘‘oYcial’’ versions of languages in all parts of the world have nowadays been heavily remodelled under European inXuence. A linguistic axiom challenged 15
- 35. Gil has published a series of comparisons (e.g. Gil 2005b) between the indigenous Indonesian dialect of the island of Riau and the formal Indonesian language used for written communication, which outsiders who study Indo- nesian are encouraged to see as the standard language of that country. Formal Indonesian does share many features of European languages which generative theory sees as necessary properties of any natural language. But colloquial Riau Indonesian does not: it fails to conform to various characteristics that generativists describe as universal requirements. And Gil argues (if I interpret him correctly) that part of the explanation is that oYcial, formal Indonesian is to some extent an artiWcial construct, created in order to mirror the logical properties of European languages. Because the formal language has prestige, when a foreigner asks a Riau speaker how he expresses something, the answer is likely to be an example of formal Indonesian. But when the same speaker talks spontaneously, he will use the very diVerent structural patterns of Riau Indonesian. In modern political circumstances Gil’s argument is very plausible. Con- sider the opening sentence of the United Nations Charter, which in English contains 177 words, consisting of one main clause with three clauses at one degree of subordination, eight clauses at two degrees of subordination, four clauses at three degrees of subordination, and one clause at four degrees of subordination (square brackets delimit Wnite and angle brackets delimit non- Wnite clauses): [We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, [which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind], and to reaYrm faith in funda- mental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions [under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained], and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom, and for these ends to practise tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours, and to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, [that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest], and to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples, have resolved to combine our eVortsto accomplish these aims]. 16 Geoffrey Sampson
- 36. Although the sentence was composed by speakers of modern European or European-derived languages (speciWcally, Afrikaans and English), it would translate readily enough into the Latin of 2,000-odd years ago – which is no surprise, since formal usage in modern European languages has historically been heavily inXuenced by Latin models. On the other hand, the early non-European language I know best is Old Chinese; so far as I can see, it would be quite impossible to come close to an equivalent of this sentence in that language (cf. Sampson 2006). Old Chinese did have some clause subordination mechanisms, but they were extremely restricted by comparison with English (Pulleyblank 1995: e.g. 37, 148V.) How- ever, if the community of Old Chinese speakers were living in the twenty-Wrst century, their leaders would Wnd that it would not do to say, ‘‘You can say that in your language, but you can’t say it in our language.’’ In order to survive as a society in the modern world they would have to change Old Chinese into a very diVerent kind of language, in which translations were available for the UN Charter and for a great deal of other Western oYcialese. And then, once this new language had been invented, generative linguists would come along and point to it as yet further corroboration of the idea that human beings share innate cognitive machinery which imposes a common structure on all natural languages. A large cultural shift, carried out in order to maintain a society’s position vis-à-vis more powerful Western societies, would be cited as proof that a central aspect of the society’s culture never was more than trivially diVerent from Western models, and that it is biologically impos- sible for any human society to be more than trivially diVerent with respect to cognitive structure. Obviously this scenario is purely hypothetical in the case of Old Chinese of 3,000 years ago. But I believe essentially that process has been happening a lot with Third World languages in modern times. That turns the generative belief that all languages are similar in structural complexity into something like a self-fulWlling prophecy. What European or North American linguists count as the ‘‘real language’’ of a distant part of the world will be the version of its language which has been remodelled in order to be similar to European languages. Because of the immense dominance nowadays of European-derived cultures, most or all countries will have that kind of version of their language available; and for a Western linguist who arrives at the airport and has to spend considerable time dealing with oYcialdom, that will be the version most accessible to study. It takes a lot of extra eVort to penetrate to places like Riau, where language varieties are spoken that test the axiom of constant language complexity more robustly. If we are concerned about the moral duty to respect alien cultures, what implies real lack of respect is this insistence on interpreting exotic cognitive A linguistic axiom challenged 17
- 37. systems as minor variations on a European theme (Sampson 2007) – not the recognition that languages can diVer in many ways, including their degree of complexity. 16 A melting iceberg The traditional consensus on linguistic complexity was accepted as wholly authoritative for much of the past century. Developments of the last few years, such as those surveyed above, suggest that it Wnds itself now in the situation of an iceberg that has Xoated into warm waters. 18 Geoffrey Sampson
- 38. 2 How much grammar does it take to sail a boat? DAVID GIL 1 Complexity of language, complexity of civilization Human languages are of much greater complexity than the communicative systems of great apes, dolphins, bees, and other animals.1 Similarly, human culture, technology, and civilization are also immensely more complicated than anything observed in other species, such as the ways in which chimpan- zees fashion tools to crack nuts or Wsh for termites. Clearly, these two facts are related: comparing humans to other species leads inexorably to the conclu- sion that linguistic complexity is correlated with complexity in other, non- linguistic domains. But what exactly is the nature of this correlation? A widespread assumption is that linguistic complexity is necessary in order to support complexity in other domains. This accords with a functional approach towards the evolution of language, whereby greater linguistic com- plexity enables humans to accomplish more tasks, and in doing so confers an evolutionary advantage. It also forms the basis for archaeological investiga- tions into the evolution of language, in which the existence of material artifacts from a certain era is interpreted as evidence that humans at that time were also endowed with the cognitive and linguistic abilities necessary for the production of such artifacts (Lee and DeVore 1968; G. Clark 1977; Roebrooks 2001; de la Torre 2004; and many others). Similarly, the discovery of the remains of an apparently new species of hominin on the Indonesian 1 Most of the naturalistic data discussed in this paper were collected by the staV at the Max Planck Institute Jakarta Field Station and its Padang and Manokwari branches. For their administrative and professional assistance I am indebted to Uri Tadmor and Betty Litamahuputty (Jakarta), Yusrita Yanti (Padang), and Yusuf Sawaki (Manokwari); and for collecting and transcribing the data I am grateful to Sarah Chakrawati, Erni Farida Sri Ulina Ginting, Ferdinan Okki Kurniawan, Dalan Mehuli Perangin- angin, and Tessa Yuditha (Jakarta), Santi Kurniati, Silvie Antisari Anhar, and Yessy Prima Putri (Padang), and Fitri Djamaludin, Yehuda Ibi, Nando Saragih, and Olivia Waren (Manokwari). For the pantun I am thankful to Kudin (Sungai Pakning).
- 39. island of Flores raises the possibility that such hominins were capable of constructing and sailing boats, which in turn may suggest that Homo Xor- esiensis was endowed with whatever linguistic abilities are necessary for the collective planning and execution of such a complex set of activities (see Morwood and Cogill-Koez 2007 for recent critical discussion). But what, exactly, are the necessary linguistic abilities: how much grammar does it really take to build a boat and sail it to a distant island? Or more generally: how much grammar does it take to do all of the things that, amongst all living species, only humans are capable of doing, such as, for example, worshipping God, waging war, and working in oYces; inventing, manufacturing, and using sophisticated hi-tech tools; and engaging in multi- farious commercial, scientiWc, and artistic activities? This chapter argues that the amount of grammar that is needed in order to support the vast majority of daily human activities is substantially less than is often supposed, in fact less than that exhibited by any contemporary human language, and far less than that exhibited by most such languages. In other words, much of the observable complexity of contemporary human grammar has no obvious function pertaining to the development and maintenance of modern human civilization. More speciWcally, it is argued that the level of grammatical complexity necessary for contemporary culture, technology, and civilization is no greater than that of Isolating-Monocategorial-Associational (or IMA) Language. 2 Isolating-Monocategorial-Associational Language Isolating-Monocategorial-Associational Language, introduced in Gil (2005a), is an idealized language prototype with the following three properties: (1) (a) morphologically isolating: no word-internal morphological structure; (b) syntactically monocategorial: no distinct syntactic categories; (c) semantically associational: no distinct construction-speciWc rules of semantic interpretation (instead, compositional semantics relies exclusively on the Association Operator, deWned in (2) below). As argued in Gil (2005a, 2006), IMA Language characterizes an early stage in the phylogenetic evolution of human language, and also an early stage in the ontogenetic development of contemporary child language. In addition it can be observed in artiWcial languages such as that of pictograms. However, no known contemporary human language instantiates IMA Language; all such languages are endowed with additional kinds of structure beyond those sanctioned by the deWnition in (1) above. 20 David Gil
- 40. The deWning properties of IMA Language represent the limiting points of maximal simplicity within each of three distinct domains: morphology, syntax, and semantics. Hence, for each domain, one may imagine languages approaching these endpoints along a scale of decreasing complexity. Accord- ingly, a language is increasingly isolating as it has less and less morphological structure, increasingly monocategorial as its syntactic categories decrease in number and importance, and increasingly associational as its construction- speciWc rules of semantic interpretation become fewer and less distinct. Alongside Pure IMA Language, as in (1) above, one may thus entertain the possibility of a range of Relative IMA Languages, approaching Pure IMA Language to various degrees within each of the above three domains. The Wrst deWning property, morphologically isolating, is the one that is most familiar, since it forms the basis for a typology that has been the focus of considerable attention in the linguistic literature. As is well known, isolating languages such as Vietnamese have considerably less word-internal morpho- logical structure than synthetic languages such as Russian, which in turn have considerably less morphology than polysynthetic languages such as Mohawk. However, no natural language is purely isolating; all known isolating lan- guages still have some morphology – aYxation, compounding, or other kinds of process such as reduplication, stem alternation, and so forth. The second deWning property, syntactically monocategorial, pertains to a domainwithinwhich the presence of cross-linguistic variation has only recently, and still only partially, been recognized. In the past, syntactic categories have generally been presumed to be universal; however, in recent years an increasing body of literature has begun to examine the ways in which the inventories of syntactic categories may vary across languages. One major area of focus has been the case of languages purportedly lacking in various part-of-speech distinctions, such as languages with no adjectives, or languages in which nouns and verbs cannot be distinguished. However, to the best of my knowledge, no language has ever actually been proposed to be purely monocategorial. In particular, most or all descriptions of languages still involve, at the very least, a distinction between one or more open syntactic categories containing ‘‘content words’’ and one or more closed syntactic categories containing various ‘‘grammatical’’ or ‘‘func- tional’’ items; see, for example, Gil (2000). The third deWning property, semantically associational, relates to the do- main of compositional semantics, the way in which the meanings of complex expressions are derived from the meanings of their constituent parts. This property makes reference to the Association Operator, deWned as follows: How much grammar does it take to sail a boat? 21
- 41. (2) The Association Operator A Given a set of n meanings M1 . . . Mn, the Association Operator A derives a meaning A(M1 . . . Mn) read as ‘‘entity associated with M1 and . . . and Mn’’. Setting n equal to 1 results in the Monadic Association Operator, manifest, for example, in constructions containing a genitive, possessive, or associative marker. Allowing n to equal 2 or more results in the Polyadic Association Operator, in accordance with which, whenever two or more expressions group together to form a larger expression, the meaning of the combined expression is associated with, or has to do with, the meanings of each of the individual expressions. The Polyadic Association Operator is responsible for the fact that in a two-word expression in which, say, one of the words contains a stem meaning ‘‘chicken’’ while the other contains a stem meaning ‘‘eat’’, the meaning of the expression as a whole must be related to ‘‘chicken’’ and ‘‘eat’’, for example ‘‘The chicken is eating’’, ‘‘The chickens that were eaten’’, ‘‘The reason chickens eat’’; it can never mean ‘‘Beavers build dams’’. The Polyadic Association Operator is thus a universal default mechanism for semantic interpretation, albeit one that is in most cases overridden and narrowed down substantially by the application of additional construction- speciWc rules. A purely associational language would be one in which there were no such further construction-speciWc rules of semantic interpretation, and in which, therefore, the compositional semantics were eVected exclusively by the Polyadic Association Operator. It is almost certainly the case that no natural language is purely associational; however, as argued in Gil (2007; 2008), some languages make relatively less use of such additional semantic rules, and may thus be characterized as more highly associational. 3 Riau Indonesian as a Relative IMA Language No naturally occurring contemporary human language completely satisWes the deWnition of IMA Language. However, whereas many languages, such as English, Hebrew, Dani (Rosch Heider and Olivier 1972), and Pirahã (Chapters 15 and 16 below), go way beyond the conWnes of IMA Language, exhibiting much greater levels of complexity with respect to morphological structure, syntactic category inventories, and compositional semantics, others approach the IMA prototype to various degrees, thereby warranting characterization as Relative IMA Languages. One example of a Relative IMA Language is Riau Indonesian, as described in Gil (e.g. 1994, 2000, 2001, 2002a, b, 2004a, b, 2005a, b). 22 David Gil
- 42. In Riau Indonesian, basic sentence structure is in fact purely IMA. Consider the following simple sentence: (3) Ayam makan chicken eat A(chicken, eat) The above sentence consists entirely of two ‘‘content words’’, and is devoid of any additional grammatical markers. The isolating characterof the language is instantiated by the fact that each of the two words is monomorphemic. The monocategorial nature of the language is reXected by the fact that the two words, although referring to a thing and an activity respectively, exhibit identical grammatical behaviour: rather than belonging to distinct parts of speech, such as noun and verb, they are thus members of the same syntactic category, which, on the basis of its distributional properties, is most appro- priately identiWed as the category ‘‘sentence’’ (see Gil 2000). Accordingly, sentence (3) as a whole is a simple juxtaposition, or coordination, of two sentences. The associational character of the language can be seen in the wide range of available interpretations: the Wrst word, ayam, is underspeciWed for number and deWniteness; the second word, makan, is indeterminate with respect to tense and aspect; and the sentence as a whole is underspeciWed with regard to thematic roles, with ayam being able to bear agent, patient, or any other role in relation to makan, and in addition also indeterminate with respect to ontological categories, with possible interpretations belonging to categories such as activity, thing, reason, place, time, and others. However, although the sentence can be understood in very many diVerent ways, such as ‘‘The chicken is eating’’, ‘‘The chickens that were eaten’’, ‘‘The reason chickens eat’’, and so forth, it is not multiply ambiguous; rather, it is extremely vague, with a single very general interpretation which may be represented, as in (3) above, with the Polyadic Association Operator, A(chicken, eat), to be read as ‘‘entity associated with chicken and eating’’, or, more idiomatically, ‘‘some- thing to do with chicken and eating’’. Sentence (3) above is a typical sentence in Riau Indonesian; it is not ‘‘telegraphic’’ or otherwise stylistically marked in any way. Longer and more complex sentences can be constructed which, like (3), instantiate pure IMA structure. Nevertheless, Riau Indonesian contains a number of features which take it beyond the bounds of a pure IMA Language. That Riau Indonesian is not purely isolating is evidenced by the presence of a handful of bona Wde aYxes, plus various other morphological processes, such as compounding, redupli- cation, and truncation. None of these processes, however, are inXectional, and none of them are obligatory in any particular grammatical environment. That How much grammar does it take to sail a boat? 23
- 43. Riau Indonesian is not purely monocategorial is due to the fact that in addition to the single open syntactic category sentence, it also contains a single closed syntactic category containing a few dozen semantically hetero- geneous words whose grammatical behaviour sets them apart from words belonging to the category of sentence. However, although most members of this second, closed syntactic category are what are generally considered to be grammatical function words, none of these items are obligatory in any speciWc grammatical construction. Finally, that Riau Indonesian is not purely associ- ational is clear from the presence of additional rules of compositional seman- tics that make reference to speciWc lexical items or to particular syntactic conWgurations, for example, word order. Still, the eVect of such rules is much more restricted than is the case in many other languages. Thus, Riau Indo- nesian is most appropriately characterized as a Relative IMA Language. The present analysis of Riau Indonesian runs counter to arguments put forward by Walter Bisang (Chapter 3 below) that in the isolating languages of Southeast Asia ‘‘less is more’’, overt grammatical simplicity being compen- sated for by ‘‘hidden complexity’’ in the semantics or pragmatics, as well as (in passing) by John Hawkins (Chapter 18 below), who makes a similar claim for ‘‘simple SVO structures with complex theta-role assignments’’ in English. Elsewhere, however, I have argued that in Riau Indonesian there is no evidence for such a trade-oV producing ‘‘hidden complexity’’; rather, simple forms map onto simple meanings with no reason to believe that the prag- matics then automatically steps in to Wll in any number of additional more complex details (Gil 2008: 124–9). 4 IMA Language is all that’s needed to sail a boat Riau Indonesian is a colloquial language variety used in informal situations as a vehicle of interethnic and increasingly also intraethnic communication by a population of about Wve million in the province of Riau in east-central Sumatra. Riau Indonesian is but one of a wide range of colloquial varieties of Malay/Indonesian, spoken throughout Indonesia and neighbouring Ma- laysia, Brunei, and Singapore by a total population of over 200 million people. Although diVering from each other to the point of mutual unintelligibility, a majority of these colloquial varieties resemble Riau Indonesian in their basic grammatical structures, and accordingly share the characterization as Relative IMA Languages. However, in addition to these basilectal language varieties, there are also versions of Standard Indonesian and Malay, typically acquired in mid-childhood or later as a second or subsequent language variety for use 24 David Gil
- 44. in formal situations; as might be expected, these more acrolectal varieties of Malay/Indonesian are less IMA than their colloquial counterparts. As Relative IMA Languages, Riau Indonesian and other colloquial varieties of Malay/Indonesian make it possible to address the question: how much grammar does it take to sail a boat? By peeling oV the extra layers of non-IMA complexity and homing in on the IMA core, one may examine the expressive power of pure IMA Language, and see exactly what levels of culture, technology, and civiliza- tion it can support. In order to do this, we shall take a look at some fragments of pure IMA Language culled from naturalistic corpora in a few varieties of colloquial Malay/Indonesian. In such corpora, most utterances contain at least some additional structure beyond what is purely IMA: an aYx, aword belonging to the closed class of grammatical functionwords, or a construction-speciWc rule of semantic interpretation. Nevertheless, it is also possible to Wnd stretches of text in which, by probabilistically governed accident, no such additional struc- ture is present, and in which, therefore, exhibit pure IMA structure. Following are some such examples of pure IMA text: (4) ‘‘Ck, emang lu libur besok?’’ tadi kan Erto. tsk really 2 holiday tomorrow pst.prox q Erto ‘‘Then Erto asked, right, ‘Tsk, do you really have a day oV tomorrow?’’’ (5) Tadi ogut pas telefon, Eto lagi mandi. pst.prox 1s precise telephone Eto more wash ‘‘Right when I phoned, Eto was taking a shower.’’ (6) Kenapa kamu ngga pengen ikut? why 2 neg want follow ‘‘Why don’t you want to come along?’’ (7) Semester tujuh sampe skarang semester delapan ni. semester seven arrive now semester eight dem.prox Semester delapan tinggal sampe kemarin baru bayar SPP. semester eight remain arrive yesterday new pay tuition_fee Baru bayar SPP selesai tra tau tong masuk new pay tuition_fee Wnish neg know 1p enter kulia kapan ni. university_class when dem.prox ‘‘From the seventh semester until now, the eighth semester. Through the eighth semester until yesterday, we only just paid the tuition fee. But even though we just paid the tuition fee, we don’t know when we’re going to start classes again.’’ How much grammar does it take to sail a boat? 25
- 45. (8) Baru de dapa sepak langsung kaki pata. new 3s get kick direct leg break Jadi semester enam tu de cuti. become semester six dem.dist 3s holiday ‘‘Then he was kicked and broke his foot. So he was out for semester six.’’ (9) Pas SMA tu sa bilang ‘‘mama kam beli precise senior_high_school dem.dist 1s say mother 2p buy sa gitar baru dulu’’. Dong beli sa gitar baru suda mo. 1s guitar new before 3p buy 1s guitar new impf want ‘‘When I went into senior high school I said ‘Mum, you should buy me a new guitar’. So they bought me a new guitar.’’ (10) Kan dia pengen orang luar nikah samo dio, samantaro. q 3 want person out marry together 3 temporary Orang tuo nyo kan ndak buliah, person old 3 q neg can dio pingin anak nyo nikah samo anak Datung. 3 want child 3 marry together child Datung ‘‘She wanted an outside person to marry her, temporarily, right. But her parents wouldn’t allow it, right, they wanted their child to marry the son of Datung.’’ (11) Karam tu. Ntah ndak tau wak ntah collapse dem.dist neg.know neg know 1 neg.know a karam rumah tu pas urang duduak ateh rumah. what collapse house dem.dist precise person sit up house ‘‘It collapsed. I don’t know how the house could collapse while people were sitting in it.’’ (12) Udah tu, hari ujan. Hari ujan masuak lah, impf dem.dist day rain day rain enter foc ado gua dakek kampuang tu, masuak lah gua tu nyo. exist cave near village dem.dist enter foc cave dem.dist 3 Masuak dalam gua tu kan, paruik lah lapa ko. enter inside cave dem.dist q abdomen ipfv hungry dem.prox ‘‘After that, it rained. As it was raining, he went in, there was a cave near the village, and he went into the cave. Having gone into the cave, he was hungry.’’ 26 David Gil
- 46. (13) Korsi kami korsi kayu, chair 1 chair wood Korsi miko korsi buloh; chair 2p chair bamboo Orang kami orang Dayak, person 1 person Dayak Orang miko orang Batak. person 2p person Batak ‘‘Our chairs are wooden chairs / Your chairs are bamboo chairs / Us people are Dayak people / You people are Batak people.’’ Examples (4–6) above are from Jakarta Indonesian, the colloquial variety of Indonesian spoken as the primary everyday language by over 20 million residents of the capital city of Indonesia and its surrounding metropolitan area, and increasingly adopted as a stylistically trendy register by middle- and upper-class inhabitants in the provinces. Examples (7–9) are from Papuan Malay, used by possibly 2 million people as the lingua franca in the western half of the island of New Guinea under Indonesian control. Examples (10–12) are from Minangkabau, spoken by an estimated 6–7 million members of the eponymous ethnicity in the province of West Sumatra as well as in migrant communities elsewhere. (Minangkabau is usually considered to be a ‘‘diVer- ent language’’; however, it is very closely related to Malay/Indonesian, and not much more diVerent from many varieties of Malay/Indonesian than such varieties are from each other. For ease of exposition, we shall thus subsume it under the heading of colloquial Malay/Indonesian.) And example (13) is from Siak Malay, a rural dialect spoken by a few hundred thousand people in the Siak river basin in Riau province in east-central Sumatra.2 The dialects represented in the above examples span a variety of sociolin- guistic types. Whereas Jakarta Indonesian and Papuan Malay are the possible products of radical restructuring such as that characteristic of creole lan- guages, and are now spoken by ethnically mixed populations, Minangkabau and Siak Malay are more appropriately viewed as direct descendants of proto- Malayic, and now constitute emblematic vehicles of the respective ethnic 2 Jakarta Indonesian has been the subject of a number of recent investigations, including Wouk (1989, 1999), Cole, Hermon, and Tjung (2006), and Sneddon (2006). Papuan Malay has featured less prominently in the literature, one recent study being that of Donohue and Sawaki (2007); it is also discussed brieXy in Gil (2002b), where it is referred to as Irian Indonesian. Minangkabau is described in a reference grammar by Moussay (1981). And Siak Malay has been discussed in the context of its contact relationship with Riau Indonesian in Gil (2001, 2002a, 2004a). The other authors mentioned above do not necessarily subscribe to the present characterization of these language varieties as Relative IMA Languages. How much grammar does it take to sail a boat? 27
- 47. identities. Speakers of these diVerent varieties range from westernized and upwardly mobile oYce workers in high-rise buildings in Jakarta, through shopkeepers and rice-farmers across the archipelago, all the way to New Guinea highlanders in penis gourds and grass skirts. Together, these four varieties of colloquial Malay/Indonesian provide a representative sample of the unity in diversity inherent in what is by all accounts a major world language. The above examples provide an indication of the expressive power of pure IMA Language, showing how it matches up to other, non-IMA Languages, by capturing notions that in other languages make recourse to specialized gram- matical constructions. Demonstratives occur in examples (7), (8), (9), (11), and (12); numerals in (7); and negatives in (6), (7), (10), and (11) – all completely within the conWnes of IMA Language, without any of the struc- turally specialized constructions used to express the corresponding notions in many other languages. Tense and aspect are expressed in pure IMA structure in several of the above examples – proximate past tadi in (4) and (5), progressive lagi in (5), sequential baru in (7) and (8), and perfectives suda in (9) and udah and lah in (12). And words with Wrst, second, or third person reference but not belonging to a grammatically dedicated category of pro- noun can be found in each and every one of the above examples; this is because the words in question belong to an open class of items containing names, titles, kinship terms, and other similar expressions. Other, more relational notions are also expressed within the conWnes of pure IMA Language. Various semantic types of attribution are all expressed by simple juxtaposition of head and modiWer: gitar baru ‘‘new guitar’’ in (9), anak nyo ‘‘their child’’ and anak Datung ‘‘Datung’s child’’ in (10), and eight other instances in (13). The formation of a content question is exempliWed in (6); the shift in perspective characteristic of a passive construction is illus- trated in (8); while some of the ways in which co-reference can be maintained are shown in (9), (10), and (12) – all remaining within the limits of pure IMA Language. Complex meanings which in other languages call for various kinds of embedded clauses may also be expressed within pure IMA Language. Among these are temporal clauses in (5), (9), and (11); complements of mental acts in (10); embedded polar questions in (4); embedded content questions in (7) and (11); reported speech in (4) and (9); and tail–head linkage, in which the Wnal sequence of an utterance is repeated, in backgrounded form, at the beginning of the next utterance, in (7) and (12). In fact, example (11), with its temporal clause occurring within the embedded question, shows how such 28 David Gil
- 48. meanings can be nested, thereby underscoring the recursive potential of pure IMA Language. Thus, as suggested by the above examples, pure IMA Language is endowed with substantial expressive power. In fact, comparing the above pure IMA fragments to the totality of the Relative IMA Language varieties from which they are taken suggests that getting rid of the non-IMA accoutrements – as per the above exercise – has no systematic eVect on expressive power in any semantic domain. The aYxes and grammatical markers that take these lan- guage varieties beyond the bounds of pure IMA Language form a semantically heterogeneous set, a functional hodge-podge sprinkled like confetti over their fundamentally IMA architecture. A few examples should make this point clear. First, consider the well-known voice markers di- and N-, which, as preWxes or proclitics (depending on the dialect and on the phonological properties of the host word), go beyond pure isolating and monocategorial structure. However, unlike prototypical passive and active voice markers, di- and N- have no eVect on the grammatical structure of the clause; they are thus optional semantic embellishments (Gil 2002b). Next, consider the marker yang, often described as a relative-clause marker. Although colloquial varieties of Indonesian do not have bona Wde relative clauses, the grammatical behav- iour of yang – it can only occur in front of another expression which functions as its host – places it outside the single open syntactic category and therefore beyond the limits of monocategoriality. However, its use is always optional; for example, ‘‘the chickens that were eaten’’ can be rendered as either ayam yang makan or, simply, as in (3) above, ayam makan. Finally, consider forms with meanings corresponding to English prepositions, such as dengan ‘‘with’’. Like yang, it can only occur in front of a host expression and is therefore not a member of the single open syntactic category of sentence. However, any expression containing dengan can be paraphrased with an alternative expres- sion not containing dengan and falling within the scope of pure IMA Lan- guage. Often, such paraphrases will contain the word sama ‘‘with’’, ‘‘together’’, ‘‘same’’, whose range of meanings wholly contains that of dengan, but which diVers from dengan in being a member of the single open syntactic category of sentence (Gil 2004b). Examples such as these demonstrate that the various non-IMA grammatical markers do not make much of a diVerence when it comes to assessing the overall expressive power of colloquial Malay/Indones- ian varieties. In principle, anything that can be said in such languages can be paraphrased within the conWnes of pure IMA Language. This being the case, pure IMA fragments such as those in (4–13) paint a reasonably accurate picture of the functionality of IMA Language, and the amount of culture, technology, and civilization that IMA Language can How much grammar does it take to sail a boat? 29
- 49. support. In a nutshell: IMA Language is enough to run a country of some two hundred million people and, by extension, most contemporary human activ- ity throughout the world. Most of the examples in (4–13) are conversational, but this merely reXects the fact that conversation is the most common human linguistic activity, and the one that our corpora accordingly focus upon. Still, as suggested by these examples, the restriction to IMA Language does not impose any constraints on the range of things that can be talked about, or on what can actually be said about those things. As the above examples show, IMA Language is enough to talk about school, sports, love, and life. And it is suYcient to support most daily activities throughout one of the world’s largest countries, from the giant metropolis that is Jakarta to the most far- Xung of island provinces. Moreover, lest this come across as too utilitarian a view of language, example (13) – a pantun, the most widespread genre of oral poetry in Malay/Indonesian – demonstrates that IMA Language can also provide the raw material for verbal art. Admittedly, there are contexts, mostly of a more formal and oYcial nature, where the colloquial language is inappropriate, and instead the somewhat more complex standard language is used. This raises the possibility that there may exist some domains for which the Relative IMA character of colloquial Malay/Indonesian is functionally inadequate. However, in many cases at least, the use of the standard language is motivated not by any functional gain in expressive power but by social conventions. For example, the president addressing the nation on television could easily get his message across in colloquial Jakarta Indonesian, but to do so would result in loss of face, thereby endangering his elevated standing. One important domain in which the standard language is typically preferred over colloquial varieties is that of writing. However, it is striking that although most Indonesians nowadays can read and write, Indonesia remains a functionally illiterate society: people prefer to communicate orally rather than in writing. A ubiquitous example is provided by public transportation, where almost every vehicle – bus, minibus, boat, or whatever – has somebody hanging onto the outside and calling out the destination to prospective passengers; even if there is also a written sign conveying the same information, people still listen rather than look. Moreover, this holds true not only in the ‘‘street’’, but in all walks of life, even academia. For example, conference organizers may nowadays distribute brochures, send out e-mail announcements, and even, in exceptional cases, create a website, but prospective participants still expect to be invited orally, by word of mouth. Thus, even if there do exist some contexts where the greater grammatical complexity of the standard language really plays a neces- sary communicative role (something that is not at all obvious), such contexts 30 David Gil
- 50. are marginal and few in number, paling into insigniWcance alongside the much greater number of domains for which IMA Language proves suYcient to do the job. What colloquial Malay/Indonesian shows us, then, is that IMA Language is all that it takes to sail a boat. This means that, if indeed Homo Xoresiensis sailed across a major body of water to reach the island of Flores, the most that we can infer from this with regard to his linguistic abilities is that he had IMA Language. More generally, what this suggests is that no amount of non- linguistic archeological evidence will ever be able to prove the presence, at some earlier stage of human evolution, of grammatical entities of greater- than-IMA complexity: preWxes and suYxes, nouns and verbs, not to mention complementizers, relative clauses, government, movement, functional cat- egories, antecedents binding empty positions, and all the other things that so delight the souls of linguists. 5 Why is grammar so complex? If indeed IMA Language is all it takes to sail a boat and to run a large country, why is it that no languages are pure IMA Languages, and most languages are not even Relative IMA Languages, instead exhibiting substantially greater amounts of grammatical complexity? One cannot but wonder what all this complexity is for. This paper has only been able to provide a negative answer, by identifying one albeit enormous thing that this complexity is not for, namely, the maintenance of contemporary human civilization: IMA Language is enough for all that. As noted at the outset, comparing humans to other species suggests that grammatical complexity is in fact positively correlated with complexity in other non-linguistic domains. However, more Wne-grained observations within the human species reveal a more ambivalent picture. Admittedly, within certain speciWc contexts, it is possible to identify what appear to be signiWcant correlations between grammatical complexity and complexity in other domains, for example in colloquial Malay/Indonesian, where the devel- opment of a non-IMA and hence more complex coordinator may be shown to be related to the introduction of mobile telephony and text messaging (Gil 2004b). However, in other contexts, the correlation seems to go in the opposite direction, as in the well-known case of language simpliWcation being associated with the greater sociopolitical complexity of contact situ- ations (e.g. McWhorter 2005 and Trudgill in Chapter 7 below). Thus, across the diversity of contemporary human languages and cultures, grammatical complexity just does not seem to correlate systematically with complexity in How much grammar does it take to sail a boat? 31
- 51. other, non-linguistic domains. (Compare the comment by Sapir quoted by GeoVrey Sampson on p. 5 above.) These facts cast doubt on a central tenet of most functionalist approaches to language, in accordance with which grammatical complexity is there to enable us to communicate the messages we need to get across. In spite of overwhelming evidence showing that diachronic change can be functionally motivated, the fact remains that language is hugely dysfunctional. Just think of all the things that it would be wonderful to be able to say but for which no language comes remotely near to providing the necessary expressive tools. For example, it would be very useful to be able to describe the face of a strange person in such a way that the hearer would be able to pick out that person in a crowd or a police line-up. But language is completely helpless for this task, as evidenced by the various stratagems police have developed, involving skilled artists or, more recently, graphic computer programs, to elicit identifying facial information from witnesses – in this case a picture actually being worth much more than the proverbial thousand words. Yet paradoxically, alongside all the things we’d like to say but can’t, language also continually forces us to say things that we don’t want to say; this happens whenever an obligatorily marked grammatical category leads us to specify something we would rather leave unspeciWed. English, famously, forces third person singular human pronouns to be either masculine or feminine; but in many contexts we either don’t know the person’s gender or actually wish to leave it unspeciWed, and we are thus faced with the irritating choice between a stylistically awkward circumlocution such as they, he or she, or (in writing) s/he, or, alternatively, the non-politically correct generic he or its overly politically correct counter- part she. Examples such as this can be multiplied at will. What these facts suggest, then, is that grammatical structure with its concomitant complexity is not a straightforward tool for the communication of pre-existing messages; rather, to a large degree, our grammars actually deWne the messages that we end up communicating to one another. Instead of wondering what grammatical complexity is for, one should ask how and why grammars have evolved to their current levels of complexity. Clearly, many factors are involved, some common to all languages, underlying the development of grammatical complexity in general, others speciWc to individual languages, resulting in the observed cross-linguistic variation with respect to grammatical complexity. Among the many diVerent factors involved, a particularly important role is played by diachrony. Contemporary grammatical complexity is the result of thousands of years of historical change, with its familiar processes of grammaticalization, lexicalization, and the like. Rather than having evolved in order to enable us to survive, sail 32 David Gil
- 52. boats, and do all the other things that modern humans do, most contempor- ary grammatical complexity is more appropriately viewed as the outcome of natural processes of self-organization whose motivation is largely or entirely system-internal. In this respect, grammatical complexity may be no diVerent from complexity in other domains, such as anthropology, economics, biology, chemistry, and cosmology, which have been suggested to be governed by general laws of nature pertaining to the evolution of complex systems. How much grammar does it take to sail a boat? 33
- 53. 3 On the evolution of complexity: sometimes less is more in East and mainland Southeast Asia WALTER BISANG 1 Setting the stage Recent functional typological approaches to complexity (McWhorter 2001a, 2005; Dahl 2004) deWne their Weld of research in terms of grammatical cat- egories and rules as they are manifested in overt morphological and syntactic structures. As will be argued in this chapter, complexity has two sides – one side is accessible through overt morphosyntactic patterns, while the other side is hidden and must be inferred from context. The former side is extensively discussed in the above functional typological approaches and will be referred to as ‘‘overt complexity’’. The latter side has been neglected in the literature. It will be called ‘‘hidden complexity’’ and will be the main topic of this paper. The two sides of complexity are deeply rooted in the observation that morphosyntactic structures and their properties can never fully express the meaning they have in a concrete speech situation. The reason for this is related to what Levinson (2000: 6, 27–30) calls the ‘‘articulatory bottleneck’’. Human speech encoding is by far the slowest part of speech production and comprehension – processes like pre-articulation, parsing, and comprehension run at a much higher speed. This bottleneck situation leads to an asymmetry between inference and articulation, which accounts for why linguistic struc- tures and their properties are subject to context-induced enrichment: [I]nference is cheap, articulation expensive, and thus the design requirements are for a system that maximizes inference. (Levinson 2000: 29) Given this situation, linguistic structures somehow need to keep the balance between expensive articulation or explicitness and cheap inference or economy.
- 54. This scenario of competing motivations has been known since von der Gabe- lentz (1891: 251) and has become part of more recent approaches as divergent as Haiman’s (1983) iconic v. economic motivations and faithfulness v. markedness constraints in Optimality Theory. Overt complexity reXects explicitness: the structure of the language simply forces the speaker to explicitly encode certain grammatical categories even if they could easily be inferred from context. Hidden complexity reXects econ- omy: the structure of the language does not force the speaker to use a certain grammatical category if it can be inferred from context. Linguists dealing with overt complexity see it as the result of a historical development in terms of grammaticalization processes. In McWhorter’s view, creole grammars are characterized by a comparatively low degree of complexity because these languages did not have the time that is needed to produce more elaborate grammatical systems. Dahl understands complexity as a process of matur- ation through history. Both approaches are ultimately based on a notion of grammaticalization that takes the coevolution of form and meaning for granted, i.e. high degrees of grammaticalization are typically associated with inXection and obligatory expression. As will be shown in section 2, this assumption is problematic (Bisang 2004; Schiering 2006). East and mainland Southeast Asian languages1 are character- ized by a rather limited degree of coevolution of form and meaning and by almost no obligatory marking of grammatical categories. As a consequence, they are more open to economy and attribute a greater importance to inference. The absence of the overt marking of a grammatical category or of a construction- indicating marker does not imply that the speaker may not want to express it – he may simply have omitted it due to its retrievability from context. If one takes the coevolution of form and meaning as universal, the perspective of hidden complexity as the result of a long-term development is unthinkable. In spite of this, the languages of East and mainland Southeast Asia provide considerable evidence that this is in fact possible. Languages with a long history can be characterized by seemingly simple surface structures – structures which allow a number of diVerent inferences and thus stand for hidden complexity. What David Gil (Chapter 2 above) calls ‘‘IMA Languages’’ are not necessarily as simple as Gil believes; their overt structural simplicity may mask hidden complexity. If one understands grammatical structures as at least partially motivated by the competing forces of economy and explicitness, overt complexity and hidden complexity are both to be expected. There are phenomena in individ- ual languages that tend more to explicitness and others that give preference to 1 For a precise deWnition of this linguistic area see Bisang (2006). On the evolution of complexity 35
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- 56. forgiven me, and shed on thee the gift of immortality, to live with me for ever in the courts of heaven. But now all is lost, and I must leave thee. On the bed, wrapped in slumber, lay the youngest and fairest of the Immortals. Ah, my lord, great is my sin, but I love thee, and my soul is thine. Over the whole wide world would I wander, or be slave to the
- 57. meanest of men, so be it I could find thee again. Ah, dearest lord! tell me not that all hope is gone. One moment he was silent, as though doubting her. Then he answered, One way there lieth before thee, if thy courage prove greater than thy faith—one only way, by which thou canst reach me—the long rough path of trial and sorrow. Heaven and earth shall turn against thee; for men win not immortality for a sigh. Yet will I help thee all I may. In thine own strength alone thou wouldst faint and die by the way, but for every step thou takest I will give thee strength for two. And now farewell! I can tell thee no more, neither linger beside thee. Fare thee well, fare thee well. As he vanished from her eyes Psyche fell senseless on the floor, and for many a long hour she lay there, hearing and seeing nothing, as though life itself had fled. VI Meanwhile the two sisters were waiting in a frenzy of impatience to know whether success had crowned their evil plot. If the doubt they had planted in Psyche's breast had borne fruit, and she had dared to disobey her lord, they knew full well that all her happiness would have vanished like a dream. Yet, fearing the anger of him whom the winds of heaven obeyed, they dared not trust themselves to Zephyr, who had carried them down before. So they wandered restlessly from room to room, and peered from the windows, hoping that Psyche in her misery would come to them and beg for succour in her evil plight. There was nothing they would have loved better than to spurn her from their doors and taunt her on the retribution which had fallen on her vanity. But all day long they waited, and yet she came not, so that at length they parted and went each one to her couch.
- 58. But the night was hot and sultry, and the eldest sister lay on her bed and tossed restlessly from side to side, and could not sleep. At length she went to the casement and drew aside the curtain and looked out on the starry night, and when she had cooled her burning brow she went back to her couch. Just as she was about to fall asleep she felt a shadow pass between her and the light from the window, and she opened her eyes, and her heart beat fast; for straight in the path of the moonbeams stood Eros, the great god of Love, and his wings stood out black against the starlit sky as he leant on his golden bow. Though his face was dark in the shadow, his eyes seemed to pierce through to her heart as she lay still and trembling with fear. But he spoke softly to her with false, honeyed words. Lady, thy sister Psyche, whom I chose out from the daughters of men, hath proved false and untrue, and lo! now I turn my love to thee. Come thou in her stead and be mistress in my palace halls, and I will give thee immortality. Lo! even now Zephyr awaits thee on the mountain-top to bear thee away to my home. So saying, he faded from her sight. Her wicked heart was filled with joy when she heard of Psyche's fall, and she rose up in the dead of night and put on her gayest robe and brightest gems. Without so much as a look on the prince her husband she went out to the mountain-top. There she stood alone, and called softly to Zephyr, O Zephyr, O Zephyr, O fair west wind, waft me, oh waft me away to my love! Without waiting she threw herself boldly down. But the air gave way beneath her, and with a terrible cry she fell faster and faster, down, down, to the gulf below, and was dashed to pieces on the rocks; and from the four quarters of heaven the vultures gathered and fed upon her flesh. As for the second sister, to her, too, the god appeared and spoke false honeyed words, and she too went forth alone; and in the
- 59. morning her bones lay gleaming white beside her sister's on the rocks below. VII When Psyche awoke from her swoon, she looked around her in bewilderment, for the scene which met her eyes was the same, and yet so different. The forest-trees waved their arms gently in the breeze, and whispered to each other in the glad morning light, and in the hedges the birds sang sweet songs of joy; for the skies were blue, and the grass was green, and summer was over the land. But Psyche sat up with a dull grief in her heart, feeling over her the dim shadow of a half-forgotten woe that meets those who awake from sleep. At first she wondered where she was, for her clothes were wet with dew, and looking round the still familiar scene, she saw the green glade in the forest, but no shining palace at the top. Then like a flash she remembered the night, and how by her doubt she had forfeited all her happiness, and she lay on the ground and sobbed and prayed that she might die. But soon tired out with weeping, she grew calmer, and remembered the words of her lord—how she could find him again only after long wandering and trial. Though her knees gave way beneath her, and her heart sank at the thought of setting out alone into the cruel world, she determined to begin her search forthwith. Through the dark forest she went, and the sun hid his face behind the pine-tops, and great oaks threw shadows across her path, in weird fantastic forms, like wild arms thrust out to seize her as she passed. With hurrying steps and beating heart she went on her way till she came out on the bleak mountain-side, where the stones cut her tender feet and the brambles tore her without mercy. But on and on she struggled along the stony road, till the path grew soft beneath her, and sloped gently downwards to the plain. Here through green fields and smiling pastures a river wound slowly towards the sea, and beyond the further bank she saw the smoke from the homesteads rise blue against the evening sky. She quickened her steps, for already the shadows from the trees fell long
- 60. across the fields, and the grass turned to gold in the light of the dying day. And still between her and shelter for the night lay many a broad meadow and the silver stream to cross. As she drew nearer she looked this way and that for a ford, but seeing none, she gathered together her courage, and breathing a prayer to the gods, stepped into the water. But she was weak and faint with fasting, and at every step the water grew deeper and colder, and her strength more feeble, till at length she was borne off her feet, and swept away by the hurrying tide. In her agony she cried out, O god of Love, have mercy and save me ere I die, that I may come to thee! Just as she was about to sink, she felt a strong arm seize her and draw her up on the opposite shore. For a while she lay faint and gasping for breath; but as her strength returned, she heard close beside her soft notes of music, and she opened her eyes to see whence the sweet sounds came. She found herself lying beneath a willow-tree, against which leant a strange musician. For his head and shoulders and arms were those of a man, but his legs and feet were thin and hoofed, and he had horns and a tail like a goat. His ears were pointed, his nose was wide and flat, and his hair fell unkempt and wild about his face. Round his body he wore a leopard's skin, and he made sweet music on a pipe of reeds. At first she was terrified at the sight of this strange creature, but when he saw her look up at him, he stopped playing, and smiled at her; and when he smiled he puckered his face in a thousand wrinkles, and his eyes twinkled merrily through his wild elf-locks, so that none could look on him and be sad. In spite of all her woes Psyche fairly laughed aloud as he began to caper round her on his spindle legs, playing a wild dance-tune the while. Faster and faster he went, and up and down, and round and round, till, with a last shrill note on his pipe and a mad caper in the air, he flung himself on the grass beside her. Have I warmed the blood back to thy heart, fair maid? he asked, or shall I dance again the mad dance that drives away cold and despair?
- 61. Nay, merry monster, even now my sides ache with laughter. But tell me, who art thou, that savest damsels in distress, and drivest away their sorrow with thy wild piping and dance? I am the god of the forest and woodland and broad wide pasture lands. To me the shepherd prays to give increase to his flocks, and the huntsman for a good day's sport. In the evening, when the moon shines high o'erhead, and the sky is bright with stars, I take my pipe and play my lays in the dim dark forest glades. To the sound of my music the brook murmurs sweetly, the leaves whisper softly o'erhead, the nymphs and naiads forget their shyness, and the hamadryad slips out from her tree. Then the eyes of the simple are opened, and on the cool, green grass by the side of the silver stream the goatherd, the neatherd and the young shepherd-lad dance hand- in-hand with the nymphs, and the poet, looking forth from his window, cries, 'How sweet are the pipes of Pan!'
- 62. Faster and faster he went, and up and down, and round and round. But when the dark storm-cloud rides over the sky, and the streams rush swollen with rain, with fleet foot I hurry through woodland and dell, and over the bleak mountain-tops; the crash of my hoofs on the rocks sounds like thunder in the ears of men, and the shriek of my pipe like the squall of the wild storm-wind. And I rush through the midst of the battle when the trumpets are calling to arms; but above
- 63. the blare of the bugle men hear the shrill cry of my pipes. Then the archer throws down his bow, and the arm of the spearman falls limp, and their hearts grow faint with panic at the sound of the pipes of Pan. Nay, turn not from me in terror, lady, he added, as Psyche made as though she would flee, for I wish thee no ill. 'Tis gods mightier than I who have made me goat-footed, with the horns and the tail of a beast. But my heart is kindly withal, or I would not have saved thee from the stream. Once more he smiled his genial smile, and puckered his face like the ripples on a lake when a breeze passes over, Come, tell me who art thou, and how can I help thee? Then Psyche told her tale, and when she had finished Pan was silent for a time, as though lost in thought. At length he looked up, and said, Thou seekest the great god Eros? I would that I could help thee, lady; but love once fled is hard to find again. Easier is it to win the dead to life than to bring back love that doubt hath put to flight. I cannot help thee, for I know not how thou canst find him, or where thou must seek. But, if thou wilt journey further, and cross many a long mile of pasture and woodland, thou wilt come to the rich corn- lands and the shrine of Demeter, the great Earth Mother. She knows the secret of the growing corn, and how the rich fruits ripen in their season, and she will have pity on a maid like thee, because of her child Persephone, whom Hades snatched away from her flowery meadows and dragged below to be Queen of the Dead. Three months she lives with him, the bride of Death, in the dark world of shades, and all the earth mourns for her. The trees shed their leaves like tears on her grave, and through their bare branches the wind sings a dirge. But in the spring-time she returns to her mother, and the earth at her coming puts on her gayest robe, and the birds sing their brightest to welcome her back. At her kiss the almond-tree blushes into bloom, and the brook babbles merrily over the stones, and the primrose and violet and dancing daffodil spring up wherever
- 64. her feet have touched. Go, then, to Demeter's shrine; for if thy love is to be sought on earth, she will tell thee where to go; but if to find him thou must cross the dark river of death, her child Persephone will receive thee. He then pointed out to her the path to the village, where she could get shelter for the night, and Psyche, thanking him, went on her way, gladdened at heart by the genial smile of the wild woodland god. That night she slept in a shepherd's cottage, and in the morning the children went out with her to point out the road she must go. The shepherd's wife, standing at the door, waved to her with her eyes full of tears. She had maidens of her own, and she pitied the delicate wanderer, for Psyche's beautiful face had shed a light in the rude shepherd's hut which the inmates would never forget. VIII So Psyche went on her journey, often weak and fainting for food, and rough men laughed at her torn clothes and bleeding feet. But she did not heed their jeers and insults, and often those who had laughed the loudest when she was a little way off, were the first to hush their rude companions when they saw her near. For her face was fairer than the dawn and purer than the evening star, so that the wicked man turned away from his sin when he saw it, and the heart of the watcher was comforted as he sat by the sick man's bed. At length, as Pan had told her, she came to the rich corn-lands where Demeter has her shrine. Already the valleys were standing thick with corn, for it was close on harvest-time, and on the hill-sides the purple grapes hung in heavy clusters beneath the tall elm- branches. As she drew near the temple, a band of harvesters came out. They had just placed the first-fruits of the corn in the shrine, and now they were trooping to the fields, a merry throng of young men and maidens. Psyche stood back shyly as they passed, but they
- 65. heeded her not, or at most cast a curious glance at her ragged clothes and bruised feet. When they had passed her, and she had heard their merry laughter and chatter die away down the lane, she ventured to enter the temple. Within all was dark and peaceful. Before the altar lay sheaves of corn and rich purple clusters of grapes, whilst the floor was strewn with the seeds and bruised fruits which the harvesters had let fall when they carried in their offerings. Hidden in a dark corner Psyche found the temple-sweeper's broom, and, taking it, she swept up the floor of the temple. Then, turning to the altar steps, she stretched forth her hands and prayed, O Demeter, great Earth Mother, giver of the golden harvest—O thou who swellest the green corn in the ear, and fillest the purple vine with gladdening juice, have mercy on one who has sinned. For the sake of thy child, Persephone, the Maiden, have pity on me, and tell me where in the wide world I can find Eros, my lord, or whether to the dark land I must go to search for him. So she prayed, and waited for an answer; but all was still and dark in the temple, and at length she turned sorrowfully away, and leant her head against a pillar and wept. And, because she had walked many a long mile that day, and had not eaten since dawn, she sank down exhausted on the ground, and gradually her sobs grew fewer and fainter, and she fell asleep. As she slept she dreamt the temple was dark no more, but into every corner shone a soft clear light, and looking round to see whence it came, she saw, on the altar steps, the form of a woman, but taller and grander than any woman of earth. Her robe of brown gold fell in stately folds to her feet, and on her head was a wreath of scarlet poppies. Her hair lay in thick plaits on her bosom, like ripe corn in the harvest, and she leant on a large two-handed scythe. With great mild eyes she looked at Psyche as one who has known grief and the loss of loved ones, and can read the sorrows of men's hearts.
- 66. Psyche, she said, I have heard thy prayer, and I know thy grief, for I, too, have wandered over the earth to find the child of my love. And thou must likewise wander and bear to the full the burden of thy sin; for so the gods have willed it. This much can I tell thee, and no more. Thou must go yet further from the land of thy birth, and cross many a rough mountain and foaming torrent, and never let thy heart grow faint till thou come to a temple of Hera, the wife of Zeus the All-seeing. And if she find thee worthy, she will tell thee how thou must seek thy love. So saying, she faded from her sight, and Psyche awoke and found the temple cold and dark. But in her heart she cherished the image of the great Earth Mother, with her large eyes full of pity, and set out comforted on her journey. Too long would it be to tell of all her wanderings and all the hardships of the road, but many a moon had waxed and waned before she stood on the brow of a hill looking down on Hera's shining temple. Down the hill she went, and up the marble steps, and men stood aside as she passed, for her face was fairer than before, and she no longer shrank back like a hunted thing, but walked with the swinging gait of those whose feet the kind earth has hardened, and the breezes of heaven have fanned the fire in their eyes. In her heart she knew that she had conquered and borne the terrors of the path with no coward's fears, and she prayed that Hera might find her worthy of doing great deeds to win back her lord. Then she stood before the altar, and made her prayer, O Hera, golden-throned, who sittest on the right hand of Zeus—O thou who, when the marriage-torch is lit, doth lead the bride and bridegroom to their home, and pourest blessings on their wedded love, have mercy on me, and show me where I may find my lord. Far have I wandered, and drunk deep of sorrow's cup, but my heart is strong for any task that shall win back my love to me. Thus she prayed, and bowed her head before the great white statue of the goddess. Even as she spoke, the statue seemed to change
- 67. and rise from the ivory throne in the shape of a woman tall and exceeding fair. Her robes were like the clouds at sunset, and her veil like the mountain mist; on her head she wore a crown of gold, and the lightning played about her feet as she gazed at Psyche with eyes that pierced through to her soul. Psyche, she said, I have heard thy prayer, and I know that thou art true. For I am the wife of Zeus, who seeth all things, and he hideth naught from me. Well I know that thou hast wandered far, and suffered at the hands of men. But greater trials await thee yet, before thou canst find thy lord. Thou must be slave to foam-born Aphrodite, the pitiless goddess of Love. And she will try thee sorely, and put thee to many a hard test ere she will forgive thee and think thee worthy of her son Eros, or of the godhead men gave thee long ago. But if thou overcomest her wrath, thou hast overcome death itself, and naught can part thee from thy lord again. Go, then, to where she holds her court in a pleasant valley by the sea, and forget not that the gods bless tenfold those who waste not the power that is given them, how feeble soe'er it be. So saying, she faded slowly away till Psyche found herself standing once more before the pale white statue. Then she turned and went through the silent temple, and out into the sunlight, and asked for the road which would lead her to the sea and Aphrodite's pleasant vale. IX For many a long day she journeyed, till at length she saw the blue sea far away and a pleasant valley sloping to the shore. Here the waves broke in laughing ripples on the beach, and the leaves danced gaily on the trees in the soft west wind; for Aphrodite, born of the foam, the fairest of all the goddesses, held her court there, surrounded by her nymphs and maidens. As she sat on her golden throne they danced around her with their white arms gleaming, and crowned her with roses, singing the while the song of her beauty.
- 68. O foam-born Aphrodite, Queen of Love, fairest of Time's deathless daughters. Thee the golden-snooded Hours kiss as they pass and the circling Seasons crown with grace. Before thee all was fire and chaos, but at thy coming like sped to like. The earth decked herself with flowers, and the nightingale sang to her mate on the bough, and in the pale moonbeams youth and maiden sped hand in hand through the glade. Thy smile is like sunshine on ripples, but the flash of thine eyes like the death-bearing gleam of the lightning; for not always art thou kind. The heart of the scorner thou breakest, and art jealous for thy rites. Wherefore north and south and east and west men worship thee, both now and evermore, O goddess of ten thousand names! As Psyche drew near the nymphs espied her. With loud cries they rushed forward, and flinging chains of roses about her, dragged her forward before the throne. A prisoner, a prisoner! they cried—a mortal, O queen, who has dared to enter thy sacred vale! What fate shall be hers? And Psyche knelt trembling before the throne. She dared not look up, for she felt the eyes of the goddess upon her, and the blaze of her anger burned through to her heart. Psyche, what doest thou here? Knowest thou not that long ago I loved thee not, because thy beauty taught men to forget my dues, and mine own son didst thou lead to disobey my word? By thy folly hast thou lost him; and glad am I that he is rid of thy toils. Think not that thy tears will move me. Those who enter my sacred vale become the lowest of my slaves, and woe to them if they fail to do the task I set them. Verily, thine shall be no light one, or I am not the Queen of Love and Beauty. O lady, answered Psyche, 'twas to be thy slave and to do thy will that I came to thy sacred vale, if haply I might turn thy wrath to love and prove myself not all unworthy of thy son. Great was my sin, O goddess, when I doubted him; but many are the tears I have shed,
- 69. and weary the way I have wandered in search of him—yea, even to the dark underworld would I go, if so be it I could find him there. As for the worship that men paid me, Zeus, who searcheth all hearts, knoweth that I lifted not mine in pride above thee. Nay, doth not every gift of beauty come from thee, O mighty one? If my face hath any fairness, 'tis that it shadoweth forth thine image. Weak are the hearts of men, lady, and hard is it for them to look on the sun in his might. Be not angry, then, if through the mortal image that perisheth, they stretch forth blind hands towards the beauty that fadeth not away. And now on my knees I beg thee, O queen, to set me thy hardest tasks, that I may prove my love or die for mine unworthiness. As Psyche was speaking the face of the goddess softened, and she answered her more gently. Thy words please me, maiden, for the gods love those who shrink not back from trial. Three tasks will I set thee, and if in these thou fail not, one harder than all the others will I give thee, whereby thou shalt win thy love and immortality. Go, maidens, and lead her to my garner, that she may sort the golden grain ere the sun's first rays gild the pine-tops. X At the command of the goddess the nymphs gathered round Psyche, and, binding her hands with chains of roses, led her away to the garner. Here they set her free, and with peals of merry laughter bade her farewell. Pray to the hundred-handed one, maiden, to help thee, cried one; thy two hands will not go far. Nay, an hundred hundred hands could not sort the grain by sunrise, said another.
- 70. Better to work with two hands, said Psyche, than idly to pray for ten thousand. But for all her brave answer her heart sank as she looked at the task before her; for she stood in the largest garner it had ever been her lot to see—wide and lofty as her father's palace-halls, and all the floor was strewn with seeds and grain of every kind—wheat, oats and barley, millet, beans and maize, which she must sort each after its kind into a separate heap before the sun should rise. However, she set diligently to work, and minute after minute, hour after hour passed swiftly by, and the heaps kept growing by her side; yet for all her toil 'twas but a tiny corner of the garner she had cleared. Feverishly she worked on, not daring to look at what remained to do. Her back ached, her arms grew stiff, and her eyes felt heavy as lead, but she worked as one in a dream, and her head kept falling on her breast for weariness, till at length she could hold out no longer, but fell fast asleep upon the cold stone floor. While she slept a marvellous thing happened. From every hole and crack there appeared an army of ants—black ants, white ants, red ants—swarming and tumbling over each other in their haste. Over the whole floor of the garner they spread, and each one carried a grain of seed, which it placed upon its own heap and ran quickly back for another. Such myriads were there, and so quickly did they work, that by the time the first ray of the sun peeped in at the windows the floor was clear, save for the heaps of sorted grain standing piled up in the midst. The bright light pouring in at the window fell upon Psyche as she slept, and with a start she awoke and began feverishly to feel about for the grain. When her eyes became accustomed to the light, how great was her joy and thankfulness to see the neat heaps before her! And as she looked round, wondering who could have been so kind a friend, she saw the last stragglers of the ants hurrying away to every crack and cranny. O kind little people, she cried, how can I thank you?
- 71. She had no time to say more, for the door was thrown open, and in a golden flood of sunlight the nymphs came dancing in. Seeing the floor cleared and the bright heaps lying on the floor, they stopped short in amazement. Verily thou hast wrought to some purpose, maiden, said one. Nay, she could never have done it of herself, said another. True, O bright-haired ones! answered Psyche. I toiled and toiled, and my labour did but mock me, and at length my strength gave way and I fell asleep upon the floor. But the little folk had pity on me, and came out in myriads and sorted out the grain till all was finished. And lo! the task is accomplished. We will see what our queen shall say to this, they answered. And binding her once more in their rosy chains, they led her to Aphrodite. Hast thou swept my garner, Psyche, and sorted the grain each after its kind? she asked. Thy garner is swept and thy grain is sorted, lady, she replied, and therein I wrought the little my feeble strength could bear. When I failed the little folk came forth and did the task. Trembling, she waited for the answer, for she feared that in the very first trial she had failed. But Aphrodite answered, Why dost thou tremble, Psyche? The task is accomplished, and that is all I ask; for well do I know the little folk help only those who help themselves. Two more tasks must thou do before I put thee to the final proof. Seest thou yon shining river? On the other bank graze my flocks and herds. Precious are they beyond all telling, for their skins are of pure gold. Go, now, and fetch me one golden lock by sunset.
- 72. So saying, she signed to the nymphs to release Psyche, who went at once towards the stream, light-hearted; for this task, she thought, would be no hard one after the last. As she approached the river she saw the cattle feeding on the further bank—sheep and oxen, cows and goats—their golden skins gleaming in the sunlight. Looking about for some means of crossing, she espied a small boat moored among the reeds. Entering it, she unloosed the rope and pushed out into the stream. As she did so, one of the bulls on the further shore looked up from his grazing and saw her. With a snort of rage he galloped down the field, followed by the rest of the herd. Right down to the water's edge they came, lashing their tails and goading with their horns, and an ill landing would it have been for Psyche had she reached the shore. Hastily she pushed back among the reeds, and pondered what she must do; but the more she thought the darker grew her lot. To get one single hair from the golden herd she must cross the stream, and, if she crossed, the wild bulls would goad her to death. At length in despair she determined to meet her doom, if only to show that her love was stronger than death. As she bent over the boat to loose the rope, a light breeze set the reeds a-whispering, and one seemed to speak to her.
- 73. She unloosed the rope and pushed out into the stream. Fair lady, leave us not, for those who reach the further shore return not to us again. Farewell, then, for ever, gentle reed, for I have a task to do, though I die in the vain attempt. Ah, lady, stay here and play with us. Too young and fair art thou to die.
- 74. No coward is young or fair, kind reed. And before sunset I must win a lock from a golden fleece yonder, or I shall never find my love again. And she let loose the rope. Stay, stay, gentle maiden. There I can help thee, for all my life have I watched the golden herds, and I know their ways. All day long they feed in the pleasant pasture, and woe to those who would cross over when the sun is high in heaven. But towards evening, when he is sinking in the far west, the herdsman of Aphrodite cometh and driveth them home to their stalls for the night. Then mayest thou cross with safety and win a lock from the golden herd. But Psyche laughed aloud at his words. Thou biddest me steal the apples when the tree is bare. Thy heart is kind, O reed, but thy tongue lacketh wisdom. Fare thee well. Not so fast, lady. Seest thou not the tall ram yonder by the thorn- bush? Sweet grows the grass beneath its shade, yet to reach it he must leave a golden tribute on the thorns. Even now there is a lock of his fleece caught in the branches. Stay with us till the herds are gone, lady, and then canst thou win the lock of gold. O kindest of reeds, forgive my blindness. 'Tis more than my life thou hast saved, for, with the task undone, I should lose my love for ever. So all day long she stayed and talked with the reeds; and they told her that often folk came down to the stream and pushed out for the other bank. But when the cattle rushed raging to the water's edge they turned back afraid, and dared not venture forth again, but went home disconsolate. And so they heard not the whispering of the reeds nor learnt the secret of winning the golden lock. Now the shadows were falling fast, and away in the distance Psyche heard the horn of the herdsman and his voice calling the cattle home. At the sound they lifted their heads, and made for the gate
- 75. on the far side of the field. As soon as they were safely through, Psyche pushed out the boat and rowed to the other bank. Swiftly she made for the thorn-bush and picked the golden lock from the bough, and as the boat glided back to the reeds, the sun sank low behind the hills. Close at hand she heard the laughter of the nymphs as they came to see whether the task were done. With a smile she drew the lock of gold from her bosom, and, marvelling, they led her back to Aphrodite. Thou hast a brave heart, Psyche, said the goddess, as she looked at the golden lock at her feet. The bravest heart could not have won this lock, lady, without knowing the secret which the reeds whispered to me. Well do I know that, Psyche. But 'tis only the pure in heart that can understand the voice of the wind in the reeds; and thus doubly have I tried thee. Take now this crystal bowl for thy third task. Beyond this pleasant vale thou wilt come to a dark and barren plain. On the far side a mighty mountain rears his peak to heaven, and from the summit a spring gushes forth and falls headlong over the precipice down into the gulf below. Go now and get me a draught of that stream, but see that thou break not the goblet on the way, for its worth is beyond all telling. In truth, as she held it out, the crystal gleamed brighter than the rainbow. Psyche took the goblet, and the first rays of the sun found her already on the plain. Far away on the other side the mountain- peak rose barren and black against the sky, and she hurried on as fast as her feet would go, lest night should fall ere she had filled the goblet. On and on she went, and at length she drew near to the mountain and looked about for a path leading up to the summit. But naught could she see save rocks and boulders and masses of crumbling stones, and there was nothing for it but to set to work to climb the rough mountain-side. Clasping the goblet tightly in one hand, she clung to the rocks as best she might with the other, fearing at every step that she would slip and break her precious
- 76. burden. How she ever reached the top she never knew, but at length she stood, bruised and torn, upon the summit. What was her dismay when she saw that the mountain-peak was divided by a mighty cleft, and across the abyss she saw the stream of water gushing out from the steep rock a hundred feet and more below the summit! Even had she toiled down again and up on the other side the rock fell away so smooth and sheer that a mountain-goat would have no ledge on which to rest his foot. Psyche sat down upon a rock to think what she must do, and the more she thought the more she felt that her last hour had come. For the only way I can reach the water is to throw myself into the bottomless abyss, where the stream flows deep down into the bowels of the earth; and I should be dashed to pieces, but perchance the King of the Underworld would have mercy on me, and let my soul return but once on earth to bear the crystal bowl to Aphrodite. So saying, she stood and bade farewell to the earth and the pleasant sunlight and the fair flowers that she loved, and prepared to throw herself over the mountain-side. As she was about to spring from the edge, she heard the whirring of wings above her head, and a mighty eagle flew down and settled on the rock beside her. Far up above thy head, in the blue sky, have I watched thee, Psyche, and seen thy labours on the mountain-side. Too brave and true art thou to go to thy death. Give me the goblet, and I will fill it. Knowest thou that yonder stream is a jet which springeth up from dark Cocytus, the River of Wailing, which watereth the shores of the dead? No mortal can touch of that water and live, or bear it away in a vessel of earth. But this goblet is the gift of Zeus almighty, and I am his messenger—the only bird of heaven that can look on the sun in his might. Give me the cup, then, and I will fill it, and bear it to the mountain-foot, that thou mayest carry it back in safety.
- 77. With tears of joy and thankfulness Psyche gave him the goblet, and as he flew away across the dark chasm, swift as an arrow from the bow, she turned and sped down the mountain-side, heeding not the stones and boulders, so glad was she at heart. At the foot she found the eagle awaiting her. O mightiest of birds, how can I thank thee? she cried. To have served thee, lady, is all the thanks I need. Farewell, and may the gods prosper thee in thy last great trial. And he spread his mighty wings and flew away. Psyche watched him till he grew but a tiny speck in the blue of the sky. Then she turned and hastened across the plain with her precious goblet of water. The nymphs danced put to meet her as before, and led her to Aphrodite. I see thou art fearless and true, maiden, she said, when Psyche had told her tale. Twice hast thou faced death without flinching, and now must thou go down to his own land; for no woman is worthy of my son's love, if she possess not beauty immortal that fadeth not with passing years. And she alone, the Queen of the Dead, can give thee this gift. Take this casket, then, and go and kneel before her and beg her to give thee therein the essence of that beauty. When thou hast it, see thou hasten swiftly back and open not the casket; for if its fumes escape and overcome thee in the world below, thou must dwell for ever with the shades. So Psyche took the casket, and her heart sank within her at the thought of that dread journey. And the nymphs waved sadly to her as she went away, for never yet had they looked on one who had returned from the dark land of shadows. XI
- 78. Away from the pleasant vale went Psyche, for she knew full well that nowhere in that fair place could she find a way down to the world below. As a child, when she had lived in her father's halls, her nurse had told her strange tales of dark and fearsome caves which men called the mouth of Hades, and how those who went down them never returned; or if one perchance, more favoured than the rest, came back into the sunlight, his face was pale and his strength departed, and he talked wildly of strange things that none could understand. Far over the country-side she wandered and asked for the gate of Hades, and some pitied her weakness, and some laughed at her foolishness, and all men thought her mad. For beggar and king, for wise and foolish, the road to Hades is one, they said, and all must travel it soon or late. If thou seekest it, in very sooth, go throw thyself from off yon lofty tower, and thou wilt find it fast enough. Sadly she went and stood on the tower, for she saw no other way. Once again she bid farewell to the earth and the sunlight, and was about to leap from a pinnacle, when she thought she heard a voice calling her by name, and she hushed her breath and listened. Psyche, Psyche, she heard, why wilt thou pollute my stones with blood? I have done thee no wrong, yet thou wouldst make men hate me and shun the rock on which I stand. As for thee, it would avail thee nought, for thy soul would dwell for ever in the Kingdom of the Dead, and the shadow of thyself, faint and formless, would glide about my walls, and with thin-voiced wailing weep for thy lost love; men, hearing it, would flee from me, and for lack of the builder's care, my stones would fall asunder, and of all my proud beauty naught would be left, save a mound of moss-grown stones and thy spirit's mournful guardianship. Then Psyche knelt and kissed the stones.
- 79. Poor tower, she said, I would not harm thee. Thou canst tell me, perchance, some better way, for I must bear this casket to the Queen of the Dead, and beg for a gift of beauty immortal, that I may return to the earth worthy of my lord. Hadst thou thrown thyself over the edge, thou wouldst never have come to the Queen of the Dead, but wailing and forlorn wouldst have wandered on the shores of the Land that has no name; for betwixt that land and Hades flows the wide Stygian stream. One boat there is that can cross it, and therein sits Charon, the ferryman of souls. Greedy of gain is he and hard of heart, and none will he take across who bear not a coin of gold in their mouths. And the pale ghosts of those who have died away from their loved ones, when none were by to pay the last rites of the dead and place the gold coin in their mouths—all these flock wailing around him and beg him with heart-rending cries to take them over the stream. But to all their entreaties he turneth a deaf ear and beateth them back with his oar. E'en hadst thou prevailed on him and come to the palace of pale Persephone, thou couldst not have entered in; for at the gates sits Cerberus, the three-headed hound of Hell, and none may pass him without a cake of barley-bread. But his soul loveth the taste of earth-grown corn, and while he devours it the giver may pass by unscathed. The coin of gold and the barley-cake I can get, she said, but how I can reach the Underworld alive I know not. Not far from hence thou wilt find the cave men call the Gate of Hades. In ignorance they name it, for no man hath proved where it leads. All the long years I have stood upon this rock have I watched the entrance to that cave, and men have come up and looked inside, and the boldest have entered in; but always have they come swiftly back, staggering like drunken men, with pale faces and wild eyes full of fear, and about them hangs the smell of the noisome vapours that rise up from the gates of the dead; and the old wives sitting by the fireside nod their grey heads together. 'Tis the tale that our mothers told us long ago and their mothers before them,' they mutter. 'Tis
- 80. surely the Gate of Hades, and those who venture too far will never come back again.' They have guessed aright, maiden, and down that dark cavern lies thy path. But if those who venture too far never return, how shall I bear back the essence of undying beauty in the casket? Instead of one gold piece, take two, and two loaves of fresh-baked barley-bread. One gold coin to the ferryman and one loaf to the hound must thou give as thou goest, and keep the rest for thy return, and from greed they will let thee pass back again. Tie the casket in thy bosom, and put the gold coins in thy mouth, and take the barley-loaves one in each hand. See that thou set them not down, or the pale ghosts will snatch them away; for the taste of the earth-grown meal giveth a semblance of warmth to their cold forms, and for a brief space they feel once more the glow of life. So by many a wile will they seek to make thee set down the bread; but do thou answer them never a word, for he who toucheth or answereth one of these becometh even as they are. Psyche thanked him for his counsel, and went forth to beg the two gold coins and barley-loaves, and for love of her fair face the people gave it gladly. When all was ready, she set out towards the cave. About its mouth the brambles grew tall and thick, and the ivy hung down in long festoons, for none had ventured in for many a long year. As best she might, she cut a way through the prickly hedge, and stood in the shadow of the cave, and the drip of the water from the roof sent a faint echo through the vaults. Through the dark pools she went, through mud and through mire, and the green slime hung like a dank pall about the walls. On and on she hastened, till her head swam round and her heart turned sick within her; for round her floated a mist of poisonous vapour, which choked her and made her gasp for breath, and monstrous shapes swept past—the Furies and Harpies and hundred-headed beasts which guard the gate to Hades. Their cries and shrieks filled the air, and every moment she shrank back, terrified that they would tear her limb from limb, as they bore down on her with the whirr of their mighty wings and their
- 81. wild locks flying in the wind. Across the path they stood and waved her back, and her heart turned cold with fear; but she pressed onward with hurrying steps, and lo! when she came up to them the shapes clove asunder like mist before the sun, and she passed through them, and found they were but smoke. And so she came to the nameless land that lies betwixt earth and Hades; a barren, boundless plain it is, with never a tree or shrub to break the dulness of its sad mud flats. Up and down it wander the shades of those whose bodies the kind earth has never covered, and they wring their hands and wail to their dear ones above, to grant them burial and the rites of the dead. For Charon, the grim ferryman, beats them back from his boat, because they have no coin, and they are doomed to dwell for ever in the land that has no name. As she was crossing the dismal plain, an old man came towards her beating a laden ass. Old and weak was he, and could scarce stagger along by the side of the beast, and as he came up to Psyche the cords broke that bound the burden on the ass's back, and the faggots he carried were scattered all about. And he set up a dismal wailing, and wrung his pale withered hands. Gracious damsel, have mercy on an old man, and help me load my ass once more. But Psyche remembered the words of the tower, and she clung the tighter to the loaves of bread, though she longed to help the feeble shade.
- 82. Help, help! I drown in this foul stream! Onward she went till she came to the banks of the Styx, the mighty river of Hell, by which the great gods swear. Nine times it winds its snaky coils about the shores of Hades, and across its leaden waters Charon, the boatman of the dead, ferries backward and forward for ever. When he saw Psyche, he hailed her, and asked her for the coin. Answering him never a word, she held out one coin with her lips, and as he took it she shuddered. For his breath was as the north
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