All speech begins as a response to other speech. (As a child you eventually speak through being spoken to.) Eventually this recomplicates into a response to speech-and-other-stimuli. Eventually, when both speech and other stimuli are stored in memory and reassociated there, this recomplication becomes so complex that it is far more useful to consider certain utterances autonomous — the first utterance in the morning concerning a dream in the night, for example. But even this can be seen as a response to speech-and-other-than-speech, in which the threads of cause, effect, and delay have simply become too intertwined and tangled to follow.
55. Quine inveighs against propositions, as part of logic, on the justifiable grounds that they cannot be individuated. But since propositions, if they are anything, are particular meanings of sentences, the impossibility of individuating them is only part of a larger problem: the impossibility of individuating meanings in general. What the logician who says (as Quine does at the beginning of at least two books) “To deny the Taj Majal is white is to affirm that it is not white” (in the sense of “nonwhite”) is really saying, is:
“Even if meanings cannot be individuated, let us, for the duration of the argument, treat them as if they can be. Let us assume that there is some volume of meaning-space that can be called white and be bounded. Therefore, every point in meaning-space, indeed, every volume in meaning-space, can be said to either lie inside this boundary, and be called ‘white,’ or outside this boundary, and be called ‘nonwhite,’ or, for the volumes that lie partially inside and partially outside, we can say that some aspect of them is white.”
The problem is that, similar to the color itself, the part of meaning-space that can be called “white” fades, on one side and another, into every other possible color. And somehow, packed into this same meaning-space, but at positions distinctly outside this boundary around white, or any other color for that matter, we must also pack “freedom,” “death,” “grief,” “the four-color-map problem,” “the current King of France,” “Pegasus,” “Hitler’s daughter,” “the entire Second World War and all its causes,” as well as “the author of Waverly”—all in the sense, naturally, of “nonwhite.”
Starting with just the colors: In what sort of space could you pack all possible colors so that each one was adjacent to every other one, which would allow the proper fading (and bounding[43]) to occur? It is not as hard as it looks. Besides the ordinary three coordinates for volume, if you had two more ordinates, both for color, I suspect it could be rather easily accomplished. You might even do it with only two spatial and two color axes. Four coordinates, at any rate, is certainly the minimum number you need. Conceivably, getting the entire Second World War and all its causes in might require a few more.
56. One of the great difficulties of formal grammars is that they are all grammars of written language, including the attempts at “transformational” grammars (Syntactic Structures: “… we will not consider, for our purposes, vocal inflections…”). For insight into how verbal signals will produce information once they fall into an interpretive field, it is a good idea to return to the mechanics of those signals’ generation.
Speech signals, or sentences, are formed from two simultaneous information (or signal) streams: Speech is an interface of these two streams.
The voiced breath-line is a perfectly coherent information stream, all by itself. It varies in pitch and volume and shrillness. It is perfectly possible (as I have done and watched done in some encounter groups) for two or more people to have an astonishingly satisfying conversation, consisting of recognizable questions, answers, assurances, hesitations, pooh-poohings, affirmations, scepticisms, and insistences — a whole range of emotional information, as well as the range Quine refers to as “propositional attitudes”—purely with a series of unstopped, voiced breaths. (Consider the information communicated by the sudden devoicing of all the phonemes in an utterance, i.e., whispering.)
The various stops and momentary devoicings imposed by the tongue, teeth, lips, and vocal chords on top of this breath-line is another coherent information string that, interfaced with the breath-line information, produces “speech.” But by and large this second string is the only part that is ever written down. This is the only part that any “grammar” we have had till now deals with. But it is arguable that this information-string, when taken without the breath-line, is as vastly impoverished as the breath-line eventually seems, after ten or fifteen minutes, when taken by itself.
The way written speech gets by is by positing a “standard breath-line,” the most common breath-line employed with a given set of vowels and stops. (The only breath-line indicators we have are the six ordinary marks of punctuation, plus quotation marks [which mean, literally, pay closer attention to the breath-line for the enclosed stretch of words], plus dashes, ellipses, and italic type. One thing that makes writing in general, and poetry in particular, an art is the implying of nonstandard breath-lines by the strong association of vocal sounds — pace Charles Olson.) But since the vast majority of writing uses only this standard breath-line (and all writing uses an artificial one), producing a grammar of a spoken language from written examples is rather like trying to produce a formal grammar of, say, Latin when the only available texts have had all the ablative endings, dative endings, accusative- plural endings, and second-person-singular verb endings in future, imperfect, and preterite whited out; and you have agreed, for your purpose, not to consider them anyway.
What is fascinating about language is not that it criticizes, as well as contributes to, the growth of the empirical world, but that it can criticize its relation to that world, treating itself, for the duration, empirically. The same self-reflective property is what writers use to make beautiful, resonant verbal objects, however referential or abstract. But by the same argument, it is the writers’ responsibility to utilize this reflective property to show, again and again, that easy language — whether it is the short, punchy banality or the rolling jargonistic period — lies.
The lie is not a property of easy words. It is a property of how the words are used, the context that generates, and the context that interprets.
57. I have the artist’s traditional distrust of separating facts too far from the landscape that generated them. (And I have the science-fiction writer’s delight over inserting new facts into unfamiliar landscapes. “Do I contradict myself? Very well…”)
Language, Myth, Science Fiction:
First contacts:
I did not have a happy childhood.
Nobody does.
I did, however, have a privileged one.
I discovered myths with a set of beautifully produced and illustrated books called My Book House, edited by Olive Burpré Miller and illustrated, for the most part, by Donald P. Crane. An older cousin of mine had owned them as a child. My aunt passed them on to me when her daughter went off to Vassar. The volumes bound in gray and mottled green dealt with history, starting with cavemen and working, lushly illustrated volume after lushly illustrated volume, through the Renaissance. Those bound in maroon and gold recounted, for children, great works of literature, fairy tales, and myths — Greek, Egyptian, Norse…
At five, I left kindergarten (the building, its bricks red as the Book House volumes, under a spray of city grime, is today a public school in the midst of a city housing project just above Columbia University) for a private, progressive, and extremely eccentric elementary school. I have one memory of my first day there, fragmented and incomplete:
43
Welsh (and Homeric Greek) divide the spectrum (both as to colors and intensity) quite differently from English.