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| Felipe de Ortego y Gasca |
I believe in the power of the word as the ultimate weapon of choice. There is, indeed, no power greater than the power of language, the medium that binds speakers of distinct languages together; and the medium that can destroy the shibboleths of power. It was the power of the word that tumbled down the walls of Jericho.
So powerful and, perhaps, so fearful was the way of the word that in biblical times, we are told, God scattered humankind over the face of the earth and separated them by a diversity of languages so they could no longer work together as one people to build a tower by which to ascend to heaven and the domain of God. In other words, humankind speaking one language threatened the eminence of God. Or was it that God saw in the one language that humans spoke a narcissistic threat to the human race in their zeal to become like God?
We have come far from that world of one language. Today we are no closer to a universal language or that language that so distressed God. We are still separated by language, even though historically there have been periods of linguistic dominance by one language or other. The English language seems to be trump at the moment. So trump, in fact, that in many English-language speaking countries there are efforts to establish English as the (official) language of those countries. In the United States there have been zealous attempts by English Only proponents to legislate English as the (official) language of states and the country.
Efforts to create artificial languages, like Esperanto or Interlingua, that incorporated elements of existing languages have not been successful. Efforts to overcome linguistic differences between people have met with varying results, more often than not exacerbating enmity between linguistic groups. Lexocentrism (linguistic chauvinism) and linguistic hegemony keep us fearful of those who speak other languages. In the United States that fear fans the fires of lexocentrism, insisting that one language (English) will unite Americans in common cause.
Despite biblical accounts of a unitary language, we note that a specific language is not the glue that binds a people. Everywhere there is internecine conflict within groups that speak the same language. Like gnomons, there are Americans who insist that American Hispanics would be ameliorated faster if they gave up Spanish for English. In a multilingual world, far too many lexocentric Americans have become deaf to the polyglot sounds of linguistic diversity.
Despite these lexical misgivings, I believe in the power of the word. The bible opens with the expression: In the beginning was the word and the word was made flesh. God did not for one minute think that when He said (Let there be light) there would not be light. Such was the power of language. Language was at the heart of human creation. It has become central to the human condition. As the anthropologists Whorf and Sapir postulated: The language one speaks shapes one's view of the world. We have yet to understand that. Via the language that shapes us, we have come to believe that the language we speak is the only language of reason and understanding, failing to realize that every language creates its own structure of reality and reason.
The structure of reality depends on our onomastic impulse—the need to label the reality that surrounds us, the realities we negotiate. Words can change our perspectives and our behaviors. This is evident in the public domain with diminution in usage of the “N” word. Making use of the “N” word in public discourse unpalatable or a faux pas has ameliorated interracial relationships. This has not eradicated vestigial effects of the “N” word in public discourse, but changing our language has helped. Indeed, changing the language helps to change reality.
In information theory, “noise” is anything that weakens, distorts or diminishes the clarity or reception of a signal–the message. In messages between culturally and/or linguistically different groups of people, culture and language contribute to the “noise” of a message–that is, language and culture are screens through which messages are filtered en route to their destination, also screened and filtered in their reception by those for whom the message is intended. Little wonder that cross-cultural communication requires considerable effort when messages are dually screened and filtered. Add to that effort the factor of translation and the task looms formidable, not impossible–just formidable. That means cross-cultural communication requires work, among other things.
All too often when embarking on cross-cultural communication, assumptions about cultural universals inhibit or deter success in transmitting the meanings of messages from one culture to another, the prime assumption being that the way one culture processes information must be the way the other culture processes information also, ergo understanding is mutual.
Cultures are large symbolic terrains that require considerable familiarity with the landscape in order to negotiate a trip and to traverse them successfully. A cultural Baedeker or map helps. But it‘s important to bear in mind that the map is not the territory. That a mark on a piece of paper is no substitute for what the map represents. Consequently, a translation of marks on a document sent from one culture to another is not a substitute for what the marks on a document represent in the language of the culture trans-mitting it.
In English the word “tree” is the transliteration of the Spanish word “arbol.” But as a transliteration the word “tree” is simply a symbol in English “approximating” a meaning for the Spanish symbol “arbol.” A translation is not a surety for understanding a message from another culture. Transliterations are, therefore, insubstantial in deciphering the lexical symbols of other cultures.
For example, the obstacles in resolving the conflict between Iraq and the United Nations–principally the United States–is one growing out of grammars of consciousness that differentiate one group from another. Messages between culturally and linguistically different groups are not understood inherently sui generis at transliteral face value. Those messages are products of evolutionary single-source information systems that create varying states of consciousness and conceptualization
That Secretary of State James Baker did not hear the message he had hoped for at the Geneva conference (January 9, 1991) from Iraqi Minister Tariq Aziz reflects the states of consciousness engendered by the language of Americans. Iraqi Prime Minister Tariq Aziz also expressed disappointment that he had not heard the message he had hoped for at the Geneva conference. Cross-cultural conflict arising out of single-source information systems requires a transcendence of expectations based on knowledge of cross-cultural communication.
The mind contains an infrastructure of conceptual knowledge that determines the outcome of information processing and leads it to “conclusions” consonant with the design and architecture of that infrastructure. The overall disposition of the mind to apprehend objects in a particular way, to select and give form to what is seen, plays an important role in perception. What we see is as much the product of incoming visual data as it is of previous knowledge organized per rules of the mind’s infrastructure.
Perception is related in significant ways to the whole general culture and social structure of the perceiver, and depends on the selection and organization of cues according to past experience and expectations. The perceiver sees a structured object or environment in the way his or her past experience and habits determine. What is perceived involves both the perceiver’s contribution ant the contribution of the “stimulus”. In physics there is the contention that the observer affects the outcome of observation by the mere act of observation. In like fashion, Einstein reasoned that we see what the language lets us see.
R.C. Lewontin put it this way:
Science, like other productive activities, like the state, the family, sport, is a social institution completely integrated into and influenced by the structure of all our other social institutions. The problems that science deals with, the ideas that it uses in investigating those problems, even the so-called scientific results that come out of scientific investigation, are all deeply influenced by predispositions that derive from the society in which we live. Scientists do not begin life as scientists, after all, but as social beings immersed in a family, a state, a productive structure, and they view nature through a lens that has been molded by their social experience.
Biology as Ideology, 1991, 3
The grammar of conflict manifests itself most often out of the monolexical restraints of single-source information systems–that is, the linguistic boundaries of an information system powered by a unique culture. A cultural-linguistic grammar that expects congruent understanding from another cultural-linguistic grammar is bound for failure unless it accepts probabilities for error and miscuing in its interaction with another cultural-linguistic group and is prepared for “course” adjustments in the cross-cultural communication process.
Secretary Baker’s uncertainty about Minister Aziz’ message was not because of faulty messages but because Secretary Baker’s single-source information system was making few allowances for error, miscue, or “entropy”–a state of disorder emanating from failed expectations—in its dealing with Minister Aziz’ single-source information system.
Perhaps Confucius put it best:
If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything”.
The Analects of Confucius, Book 13, Verse 3. James R. Ware, translation 1980
Unfortunately, caught in the web of our proper language, all of us are aurally challenged by the languages of the others. We have come to believe that transliterations of linguistic codes enable us to understand the minds of those who do not speak our language. That assumption has led humans along perilous paths. That assumption is why we can win wars but not the hearts and minds of people we vanquish. But I believe that in the long run the more we learn about the words of others the closer we will come to the unity of global understanding.
It will take an alchemy of the word to save us from ourselves. Perhaps that's what God had in mind when He destroyed the Tower of Babel. However, as William of Occam (1300 A.D.) put it to medieval philosophers: God could not be proved by words, yet it is by the medium of words that we communicate with God.
Author’s note: This work incorporates text from my essay, “The Power of Words,” for This I Believe.
Dr. Felipe de Ortego y Gasca, Ph.D.,Scholar in Residence, Department of Chicana/o and Hemispheric Studies, Western New Mexico University, was the Founding Director, Chicano Studies, UT El Paso, 1970-72.