Splitting the Ever Finer Hair

There is the distinction between God and human, along the lines of self sustenance. There is the distinction between angel and human, along the lines of embodiment. Then there is the distinction between human and animal, along the lines of language. Or, according to Noam Chomsky as referenced in this New Yorker article, along the lines of recursive linguistic structures.

At least, that is the progression I thought of as I was reading this fascinating article, which isn't specifically about Chomsky himself, but about a linguist whose work with a tribe in the Amazon challenges basic tenets of Chomsky's language theories. Several things in the article stand out to me. One is the hierarchy of distinctions that I sketched out above, like this:

This hierarchy isn't in the article itself, but suggested by it, specifically by the last distinction, which is in the article. According to Chomsky, the distinction between human and non-human doesn't come down to having or not having language. It comes down to the expression of linguistic recursive structures in the language.

This progressively fine - and tortured - distinction to separate us from animals - actually, to separate us as humans from everything not-human - why do we do this? Why are we always trying to separate ourselves like this? In any case, in this last distinction, my immediate question is, How do we know that elephants, for instance, don't use recursive structures in their grammar? Or ants?

Another striking thing about the article comes at the very end (the article is quite long, and quite satisfying in its length): a linguist and missionary working with the Amazonian tribe that is the focus of the article says about this tribe's language:

“This language uses prosody much more than any other language I know of,” Keren told me. “It’s not the kind of thing that you can write, and capture, and go back to; you have to watch, and you have to feel it. It’s like someone singing a song....Pirahã has just always been out there defying every linguist that’s gone out there, because you can’t start at the segment level and go on. You’re not going to find out anything, because they really can communicate without the syllables.”

This is strikingly like statements by Owen Barfield in Poetic Diction, and in places in Saving the Appearances. In fact, in the case of Poetic Diction, it is almost the confirmation of his most basic premise: unity precedes isolation. Or, concrete precedes the literal. It also echoes his procedure for spying out the evolution of consciousness: it's not the kind of thing you can write, and capture, and go back to. Also, it reminds me of Fangorn the Ent, when asked by the hobbits Merry and Pippin, what his name is. He says that would take a very long time to tell, as it would be his life story, and to the hobbits it would also sound much like song.