Communicating with language

EUGENE KAELLIS

It has been claimed that late-stage human fetuses respond to sounds, allegedly thriving on Mozart, not as well on rock. Certainly after birth, the human brain is always busy – processing information derived from hearing, seeing, smelling; absorbing and evaluating data; cerebrating, excogitating, planning and fantasizing.

Exposed to repeated stimuli, we unconsciously absorb perceptual-thematic elements. Western cultures, based significantly on written languages, have inculcated a left-right bias. Indeed, attracting the eye to move in the opposite direction may generate a subliminal unease. It is claimed, for example, that Albrecht Dürer’s engravings elicit tension because he did not make his plates the mirror image of the configurations he presumably wanted.

Hebrew and other Semitic languages are read right to left. Since music notation is left-right, singers reading scores have to make the adjustment. Although so many Israelis speak, read and write English, it might be interesting to approach a compositional critique of contemporary Israeli art, to see whether it displays a right-left bias.

Chinese consists of thousands of characters, read left-right or up-down. The difficulty in learning the written language contributed to the widespread illiteracy in China before the People’s Republic. Yet, each character, having to fit into nine squares, may have contributed to an exquisite sense of composition, the major element of traditional Chinese art. Since a character could, before recent simplification, contain as many as 36 strokes, each having to be executed in order, a Chinese typewriter is a contradiction in terms. Now, there are at least two word-processing systems, one using a keyboard, consisting of stroke elements, the other, far less widely used, of an electronic tablet and stylus.

Shortly after the People’s Republic was proclaimed, Mao convened a congress of linguists. At a time when the party could change almost anything, they were to decide whether or not to switch to a system of transliteration, using the Latin alphabet. Probably for political reasons, the linguists decided to stay with characters, which evidently didn’t hamper technological development. Whatever motivated them, it was a good decision. Having about a fifth of the world’s population thinking in characters, each of which is unique to what it represents, generates a sort of gestalt/synthetic mentality different from the analytical one developed in alphabet languages. English, the world’s largest language, now with some 900,000 words (and growing), is constructed from merely 26 letters.

Joseph Needham, the foremost Western expert on Chinese science, noted that, although, for example, East Indians and Greeks of antiquity, speculated on what ultimately developed into the atomic theory, the Chinese, in spite of their early technological achievements, never did. One can surmise that building innumerable words from the same relatively few letters induced a mind-set that facilitated the development of the atomic concept.

In 1954, a scholarly paper by Thorlief Boman, a Norwegian writing in German, compared what he called “dynamic and static thinking,” the former, which he associated with Hebrew, the latter, with Greek. “Israelite thinking,” he claimed, using the Bible for his research, “was dynamic, vigorous, passionate” and sometimes, “quite explosive,” discordant, at times even displaying “bad taste.” Greek, on the other hand, was “harmonious, prudent, moderate and peaceful.” (This didn’t prevent the Peloponnesian War, enduring for 27 years, with Athenians fighting Spartans.) Boman claimed that much of the idiosyncratic “Hebrew psyche” was based on language and stimulated activity and dynamism, while Greek, to apply Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s description of Classical Greek architecture, displayed “Stille grosse und edele einfach,” “Quiet greatness and noble simplicity.”

There is certainly enough stark drama in the Torah to justify Boman’s contention – the wrath of Moses, the madness of Saul, the lasciviousness and conniving of David – compared to the alleged perfection of Jesus. The scribes candidly depicted human beings with all their strengths and frailties, their passions and their piety. It is useful to keep in mind that Christianity developed using Koine, the Greek lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean world.

Boman examined common Hebrew verbs, demonstrating how difficult it is, out of context, to define them as transitive, i.e., taking an object, or intransitive, like the most important verb in English, “to be,” which never takes an object in its conjugated forms. He demonstrates that, in Hebrew, “motion” and “standing” are not opposites, but are closely related, the static form being the consequence of previous movement. The standing of Jordan’s water, described in Joshua 3:13,16, as the Israelites are about to cross it, is not merely still; it exhibits the discontinuance of flowing. He offers other examples to demonstrate that, in Hebrew, motion, not stasis, is fundamental, with the latter derived only from interrupted motion.

Boman refers to more than 200 Hebrew verbs that have simultaneously “being” and “becoming” qualities. Between the two states, the difference in Hebrew is irrelevant, since they are not contending; rather, they are unitary. Everything already contains the seeds of its own transformation. “The Hebrew mind,” he concludes, “is directed toward the dynamic and active.” For example, “to be” (hayah) is as much “to become,” emphasizing the potential as well as the actual.

This simultaneity of “being” and “becoming” appeared centuries before Heraclitus stated, “One never steps in the same stream twice,” (fifth-century BCE) and preceded, by many centuries, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s dialectic. It would be interesting to speculate on how much of Karl Marx’s dialectical materialism, which he derived from Hegel, is ultimately traceable to the influence of his rabbinic forebears.

When the concept of political Zionism became prominent in the 19th century, Theodor Herzl envisaged the Jewish state as using German, undoubtedly because he wrote in German and because Germany was then a centre of Western intellectualism, science and learning; and perhaps because Germany was then not as antisemitic as France. It was, after all, exposure to the Alfred Dreyfus case that decided Herzl on Zionism.

It was Eliezer Ben Yehuda (1858-1922), born in Vitebsk, Belarus (also the birthplace of Marc Chagall), who became a Zionist early in his life and who was largely responsible for the adoption of Hebrew as the common language of early Zionist settlers and its eventual adoption as the major official language of Israel. Ben Yehuda studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, before deciding that a resurrected, modernized Hebrew should become the language of the new Jewish state. In 1881, he emigrated to Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire, and was buried on the Mount of Olives, with 30,000 Jews attending his funeral. Today, a major street in Jerusalem is named after Ben Yehuda. Much of his task was inventing new words for what did not exist in biblical times, which he did by Hebraicizing Latin and Greek words that form the basis of scientific English.

Environment and language both reflect and shape cultures, the latter, especially in the way we conceive abstractly. Even when we use the same words, their internal associations are largely personal and may, therefore, be unique. That we can communicate explicitly and can express highly abstract thoughts in language must surely rank near the top of the intellectual attributes of human beings. Yet, God must have loved diversity for, whatever motivated Him, He created the Tower of Babel. For years, I have taught English grammar to Chinese immigrants. It is hard to imagine two languages more dissimilar than English and Chinese, and it is a source of wonder to me that people brought up in one of these languages can learn the other.

Believing that language differences contribute to conflict, in the 1870s and 1880s (with a manual published in 1887), Ludvic Lazarus Zamenhof, a Russian Jew, upset by all the divisions, often violent, among nations, invented a new language, Esperanto, its name based on the Latin for hope, the adoption of which, he believed, would help eradicate war and lead to greater understanding and mutual acceptance. It perhaps did not occur to him that civil wars are often the most vicious. Esperanto’s alphabet was Latin and it was based entirely on European languages.

Although more than 4,000 books were written in Esperanto, the Bible was translated into it and Esperantist congresses were attended by thousands of members, evidently Zamenhof’s hope never succeeded. Today, there remain only a few adherents. Other ways toward universal peace will have to be found.

Eugene Kaellis has written Making Jews on the theme of the current basic problem of Diaspora Jewry, which is available from lulu.com. He has spent more than 10 years as a volunteer teacher of English grammar to immigrants, mostly Chinese.

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