How does our hunger for a stable, safe, predictable world affect us? Can we see beauty in an unstable, unpredictable, risky world? Can we see compassion in chaos? How would we describe a world that loved us, but never stopped changing, whether we wanted it to or not?

I can’t get off this language kick for now. Someday you’ll appreciate this. No, really. Okay, maybe not. Regardless:

As this wikipedia article on Navajo classificatory verb stems shows, some animist languages prioritize communicating the shape and type of movement for a subject.

For example, the English verb “give” is expressed by eleven different verbs in Navajo, depending on the physical characteristics of the given object, such as: solid roundish object, load/pack/burden, non-compact matter, slender flexible object, slender stiff object, flat flexible object, mushy matter (includes drunk people and ice cream!), plural objects (two different types), open container, animate objects.

For example, “give me the tobacco” would change depending whether you meant plug tobacco, pipe tobacco, a cigarrette, a tobacco plant, tobacco leaves, a sack full of tobacco, and so on. Not because the name would change, but because the sense of the shape and relationship to the giver/receiver would change.

Compare this to English, where not only do we not prioritize this type of three-dimensional awareness, but we’d much rather know the brand of the tobacco than its physical properties. We prioritize the names of things, over the things themselves.

As an animal tracker, imagine how much more useful this language-inspired awareness would feel. Speaking in this kind of way keeps you close to observation, to direct experience, and away from “names” that pretend to contain knowledge.

So in a verb-only universe, all reality consists of flows, patterns, forces.

All “things” we formerly considered “things”, we now see as processes.

And all that our senses take in we begin to experience as baskets….containing…emptiness.

Hierarchy falls apart….

and the first bird of dawn begins to sing.

I mentioned in passing here a couple posts back, about how the Perfect Map of a certain thing means the thing itself.

You may have wondered to yourself (and well you should!), “But what about ‘cartography’? What about making mythic maps, if one cannot really make a perfect map?”.

Ahh! Well, my friend, I have a story for you:

Two crows perched on a power line. One, older and wiser, said to the other younger and more foolish crow, “Have you ever thought about the words ‘as the crow flies’?”

Younger and Foolish paused and replied, “No…well, it just means how we fly level and therefore shorter distances and the no-wings have to go up and down over the earth, traveling many times farther in actual distance even though no more than us in terms of map distance.”

Older and Wiser smiled. “But don’t we go up and down in the air, rising on currents, diving at other times?”

Younger and Foolish said, “Yes…but we don’t have to.”

Older and Wiser said, “Don’t we?”

Younger and Foolish said, “Oh. Well, sometimes, I suppose, in strong wind, or in certain weathers.”

Older and Wiser said, “So ‘as the crow flies’ really means sometimes straight and sometimes not, which means just about the same as how the no-wings travel.”

Younger and Foolish thought a bit, and replied, “Well yes, but I don’t think the no-wings mean it that way.”

Older and Wiser laughed. “No, I don’t believe they do.” Younger and Foolish laughed too.

“And that,” Older continued, “explains why you yourself comprise the Perfect Map.”

So what does it mean to make good observations? What does it mean to communicate real content, to say things worth saying?

I know that when I turn off my mind, and I just observe, just pay attention, I have an experience full of content. I also stay aware that the habits of my attention, what I seek out and look at in my backyard or on the street, or in the faces of my friends, remains heavily influenced by my personal history, my culture, and how I form my thoughts in language. Silence remains available, however, and I can always go back to that world where I have as much in common with a chair, a fly bouncing against a window pane, and a puff of air, as I do with another human being. And the more time I spend in the silence, the less influence my culture, history, and language have over me. I don’t know that they ever disappear, but they lessen, and I can begin to experience purely, to notice things I hadn’t before. To participate in the weaving of the patterns of the world.

In this realm, I can play with what it means for everything to express itself as a verb, rather than as a noun. That rock there…what verb does that express? Does it shine, sit, what sound does it make when I knock it against another rock, against many other kinds of rocks, does it smell, what does it taste like?

For those of you who’ve read up on the Riddle articles here, you’ll recognize this immediately as the art of questioning.

I form questions out of words, and questioning gives me such rich experience, that I don’t want to give the impression that I have a problem with language itself. Languages can and do expand and deepen our experience, and give us richer lives. I want to know how I can do that even more, by exploring my relationship with language.

I’ve heard before of famous eccentrics and scientists forming their own language (Buckminster Fuller comes to mind, and of course Korzybski’s E-prime), and I’ve really begun to understand their motive now. We can improve and adapt every tool we use, to help us live in this world more richly. Language, always talking but strangely silent when it comes to this, fulfills the role of a tool. Why not look at our language and decide what we think works and what doesn’t?

Hmm. I’ve asked this question several times, and I haven’t quite asked it in a way that satisfies me yet.

Where English and other Western Indo-European languages are noun-dominated, Native American languages are verb dominated-, they are relationship/process-oriented, rather than object-oriented: watching the dancing rather than the dancers — the dancers fade back- into the background as you just describe the rhythms and the motions of what is.
-Dan Moonhawk Alford

Buckle your seatbelts! He says more…

My Indian friends say that they can talk all day long and never utter a single noun. And this is real boggling to us English speakers. We couldn’t even think of doing that. But when you have verbs that are like our English verb “slither,” where there’s basically only one thing that slithers, you know what the subject is; and [it] you multiply that by many thousands, you can get an idea of how you can talk without nouns.

So what, right? Well: when the language that you’re using to describe phenomena no longer adequately describes the phenomena, you want to change the language.

We make a fundamental error when we confuse our words, our language, with reality. So any language we develop and employ must stay clear on this point, that we only attempt to describe, we do not define.

The map is not the territory.
Alfred Korzybski

It sounds like a nice quote, doesn’t it? But what kind of cultural madness makes the statement even necessary? Of course the map does not equate with the territory to which it refers. But perhaps our relationship with maps creates the problem, not the usefulness of maps themselves.

In a language governed by “nounyness”, the speakers must pretend to “identify” objects as nouns, as things, as well…objects. But we know that any line we draw between an “object” and its surrounding environment, we draw arbitrarily, or to point out one aspect of that particular territory. We define the map by excluding the details we don’t find relevant. A map that includes all the details of the territory it maps, would constitute the territory itself!

A perfect map of New York, with every last nuance included, could only constitute New York itself! A perfect map of the planet Earth, well, we live on it, and we call it…the planet Earth.

So a language map of reality would best not pretend to equate to reality itself.

To say, “a cat ‘is’ a cat” means nothing. To say, “Frank ‘is’ a teacher” means nothing. It stands nearly empty of content, except to somehow hint at how Frank might make his living.

I literally had someone once tell me, “hey, but you can’t deny: you ‘are’ you. You can’t deny that.”

Ummm…what? That has no content, except for the word ‘you’.

So the goal remains: to put real content back into our language, to stay true to describing processes, rather than presuming identity. To make observations that matter, rather than loop back in upon themselves.

Does the language we speak blind us to the way the world works?

Can we make better observations, and therefore better choices, by changing the way we speak?

One example of “changing the way we speak” involves removing the verb “to be” from one’s use of english, creating “e-prime”. I’ve written a little bit on this before, and currently write mostly in e-prime.

However, e-prime only addresses two problems with the english language; it removes the “is of identity” and the “is of predication” [Meaning, no one thing exactly equates with anything else (John may farm, but calling him a “farmer” oversimplifies all that John expresses as a human being)], and stresses the presence of an active observer (”I see a red cat” rather than “That cat is red”).

In the end, though, we still have a language fundamentally oriented around abstractions and visual concepts; we tend to “see” what the speaker describes. In the Native American language of Blackfoot (Alford 2002), if you speak about someone riding a horse, in that genderless and fundamentally relative language, the listener receives the feeling of riding, not the picture of riding; the movement, sway, and balance of riding the horse, not the image of a rider. Notice also that the listener identifies empathetically with the one doing the riding. You can see someone riding without much impact, but if you “feel” someone riding you’ve entered their world (and essentially begun tracking them; see any of the many articles I’ve written here on the nature of tracking).

Examples abound how indigenous (non-civilization) languages simply present a more scientifically accurate version of the world, linguisitically speaking. What self-respecting modern scientist wouldn’t drool uncontrollably over the opportunity to speak with an evidential case, allowing one to evaluate or share information/data while easily communicating the quality of the data, such as:

* Witness vs. Nonwitness
* Firsthand vs. Secondhand vs. Thirdhand
* Sensory
o Visual vs. Nonvisual (i.e. auditory, olfactory, etc.)
* Inferential
* Reportative
o Hearsay
o Quotative
* Assumed

(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality)

Now, one can, through flogging English enough, communicate these things in a long-winded manner, but just imagine a language that makes it a fact of daily, common conversation, to speak in such a way. No recourse to scientific jargon, or steepling one’s fingers while leaning back in an easy chair while saying “evidence suggests that, if this data holds true…etc. etc.”. Everyday english speakers don’t speak that way.

To our great loss, we have no easy way of communicating the fluid and contextual nature of observation. Languages spoken by animal trackers and animists, however, effortlessly enable their speakers to do so.

Why? Because our science has only just begun to catch up with knowledge that we once had, and that indigenous animist cultures still have (where they still live): that the universe constantly changes, that we make observations about it using both our heads and our hearts, that we cannot separate the observer from the observed, and that we will always stay at least one step behind the track of the mystery that makes it all possible.

This all brings us to Quantum Linguistics. The late Dan Moonhawk Aldorf did some important work in this area, explicating why native languages seem to come pre-equipped to speak about quantum events, while english (and other indo-european languages) come so ill-equipped.

Does language indeed change the way we observe the world? If so, what next? Do we junk English for some indigenous language, wrestled from its original speakers? Do we try to fix English, as in e-prime, tinkering with it to bring it back some measure of usefulness?

Well, I can say one thing: we have a lot of experimenting to do, and no one person will solve this fiendish riddle.