I Speak, Therefore I am: Seventeen Thoughts About Language

Here language becomes language, or rather linguistics becomes linguistics. We are no longer dealing with atoms in isolation—lists of names, as in the case of the Book of Genesis. Instead we are looking at combinations among atoms. This is the birth, or rather the recognition, of the most important molecules of words: sentences. At the same time it is recognized that not all combinations of words work. In this connection Plato uses the verb harmóttein, which we can translate as “to harmonize, to agree.” But it is interesting to note that harmóttein comes from a different domain. For example, a carpenter assembling pieces of wood to make a stool would use this verb to say that one piece of wood fits better than another. Plato was aware of this, so much so that when he talks about words he begins with “so too,” because just before he was giving exactly the example of how pieces of wood fit together. Fitting together means having two forms that are not only compatible but also complementary; that is, together they form something new that stands on its own. This means recognizing that language consists in harmony, of putting together parts in a way that is not random. This is the fundamental point regarding the structure of human language: it says that, starting from a set of primitive elements (whether sounds or words), not all combinations give rise to possible structures. It didn’t take long to recognize this characteristic of language and give it a name: “syntax,” i.e., composition (Graffi 2001, 2010). But it took more than two thousand years for linguists to recognize that these combinations manifest special mathematical properties that can be neither derived from experience nor constructed by chance, a result often ignored partly, due to a certain perverse tendency to privilege ideology over data (Berwick 1985; Chomsky 2012, 2013). The empirically based deductions concerning these mathematical properties are now established—later we will see some of them—and in some cases have the status of theorems. Continued attempts to dismantle and refute them are like trying to tickle a marble statue.

It should come as no surprise that the verb harmóttein, and the word “harmony” derived from it, are used in music, in art, in architecture, and in the theory where beauty matters, aesthetics. We can wonder why Plato used precisely this image and not a different one, but as Saussure once said in an unpublished note: “When we venture into the territory of language all the analogies in heaven and earth abandon us.” Perhaps one image is as good as another; however, in talking about words, this attempt to convey the idea of the right combination in concrete, geometrical terms does not seem accidental. But if we look at language in particular, all kinds of different ways of fitting things together come to mind straightaway, all kinds of harmony: an article, for example, can harmonize with a noun, an auxiliary with a participle, a preposition with a verb, while still the mother of all linguistic harmonies is the agreement of noun and verb. In fact, Plato gives this case a special status, so special as to have it coincide with the essence of the logos, that is, discourse: that human reality, a uniquely human reality, made up of meanings, signifiers, and rules of combination. It is this reality that your eyes are seeing in a particular form, the written form, as they pass over this page at this very moment. You see it so naturally that it passes unnoticed, and yet it is so powerful and pervasive as to be able to evoke a mental image that has practically no probability of being predicted on the basis of the surrounding environment or the circumstances you are in at this moment, such as “a long line of lizards crossed the desert without even stopping to dream.” Nobody can voluntarily fail to understand a sentence.

Plato doesn’t explain to us what creates this harmony, but he presents it as intuitively obvious, and it is difficult to disagree with him in this. Even if we don’t know how to define a noun, a verb, or a sentence, or if questions of linguistics do not interest us, we have no difficulty in recognizing the difference between two-word sequences such as “they thing” and “they think”: in the second it seems that the words show a harmony missing in the first, whatever exactly we mean by “harmony.” If, as Alfred North Whitehead said, all Western philosophy can be seen as a series of footnotes to the Platonic dialogues, the special harmony between nouns and verbs that creates discourse is one of the clearest examples of an original insight and, at the same time, of an idea that has persisted throughout Western thought in general: from linguistics to logic, from mathematics to artificial intelligence. The harmonic fit of nouns and verbs thus becomes the backbone of language and thought.