Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

The differential function of speech goes even further than that. No two individuals make exactly the same sounds, even when they are speaking the same local variant of a language. All my mother-in-law ever needed to say when she rang was Allo! C’est moi! A waste of breath, I would think every time. But the unreflecting purpose of her phatic expression was only partly to “establish the channel.” What it did was confirm an interpersonal relationship based on the irreducible difference between her and me. Every act of speech does just that—whatever you say.

Individual diction and forms of speech do not vary because they need to for any physical, intellectual, or practical reasons—impersonators demonstrate that it is possible to adopt the voiceprint of someone else if you train yourself hard enough. Individual speech varies because one of the fundamental and perhaps original purposes of speaking is to serve as a differentiating tool—not only to differentiate where you come from, what rank and clan and/or street gang you belong to, but to say “I am not you but me.”

Babel tells the wrong story. The most likely original use of human speech was to be different, not the same.

In parts of the world that are sparsely populated and where travel is made perilous by physical obstacles—high mountains, waterless deserts, or thick jungle—linguistic diversity is extremely high. That is because the various indigenous communities of Papua New Guinea, the great Australian plains, and the Amazon basin do not often come into contact with one another. Even in a wealthy country such as Switzerland, the physical obstacles to contact between its many high valleys over the centuries have left their mark in the continued cohabitation of four main languages. But in other parts of the world where geography is more conducive to travel, and thus to contact, interchange, trade, and war, linguistic diversity is much reduced. Languages merge when people do.

Let us therefore abandon the old image of linguistic diversity as a picture of rivulets splitting and dividing as they course down the mountainside from a single glacier tip. We should see it rather as the always provisional result of a multiplicity of springs, wells, ponds, and snowmelts furrowing down into valleys to meet and merge in broader, deeper rivers. English is once again a fairly extreme example—its identifiable sources include the Germanic language of the Angles and Saxons, the French learned by the Norman soldiers who overran the island in 1066, together with ample helpings of Latin, a dash of Danish, a sprinkling of Celtic, and bits and bobs from at least a hundred languages around the world. Just at the moment it seems to be bursting its already wide banks and spilling into many other streams. But it’s not really anything to worry about. There is no greater likelihood of all languages being gobbled up by English than of the Amazon and the Volga flowing into the same sea. In any case, as we have seen, the primordial mechanism of linguistic differentiation makes English no less a tool for marking difference than any other tongue.

It follows from this that translation does not come “After Babel.” It comes when some human group has the bright idea that the kids on the next block or the people on the other side of the hill might be worth talking to. Translating is a first step toward civilization.

Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of years elapsed between the emergence of speech sounds to perform the social bonding functions of grooming and the invention of alphabetic script. In the course of that forever-hidden eon, human communities found that they could do vastly more things with speech than just keep their families, clans, and tribes in good order.

Translation deals with most of those other things. It does not and cannot attempt to perform or mimic or replicate the interpersonal functions of human speech. As we noted in an earlier chapter, translators do not match dialect for dialect when translating between established languages. “Hallo, darling,” “Howzitgaun?” and “Wotcha, mate” are forms of greeting that declare the speaker to be, respectively, a fashionista, a Glaswegian, and a Londoner. They may serve as translations of bonjour, monsieur, but the task they perform, involuntarily and obligatorily, is to claim membership of that community and not any other. It makes no sense to imagine transporting the ethnic, self-identifying dimension of any utterance. Absolutely any other formulation of the expression, in the same or any other dialect or language, constructs a different identity.

If you’re looking for the ineffable, stop here. It’s blindingly obvious. It’s not poetry but community that is lost in translation. The community-building role of actual language use is simply not part of what translation does.