Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

I still find it bewildering that a man of Bloomfield’s vast knowledge and intelligence should ever have thought that “NaCl” or “sodium chloride” constitute the meaning of the word salt. What they are is obvious: they are translations of salt into different registers of language. But even if we revise Bloomfieldian naïveté in this way, we are still trapped inside the idea that words (translated into whatever other register or language you like) are the names of things.

One well-known reason so many people believe words to be the names of things is because that’s what they’ve been told by the Hebrew Bible:

And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. (Genesis 2:19)

This short verse has had long-lasting effects on the way language has been imagined in Western cultures. It says that language was, to begin with, and in principle still is, a list of words; and that words are the names of things (more particularly, the names of living things). Also, it says very succinctly that language is not among the things that God created but an arbitrary invention of humankind, sanctioned by divine assent.

Nomenclaturism—the notion that words are essentially names—has thus had a long history; surreptitiously it still pervades much of the discourse about the nature of translation between languages, which have words that “name” different things or that name the same things in different ways. The problem, however, doesn’t really lie in translation but in nomenclaturism itself, for it provides a very unsatisfactory account of how a language works. A simple term such as head, for example, can’t be counted as the “name” of any particular thing. It figures in all kinds of expressions. It can be used to refer to a rocky promontory (“Beachy Head,” in Sussex), a layer of froth (“a nice head of beer”), or a particular role in a bureaucratic hierarchy (“head of department”). What connects these disparate things? How do we know which meaning head has in these different contexts? What does it mean, in fact, to say that we know the meaning of the word head? That we know all the different things that it means? Or that we know its real meaning but can also cope with it when it means something else?

One solution proposed to the conundrum of words and meanings is to tell a story about how a word has come to mean all the things for which it serves. The story of the word head, for example, as told in many dictionaries, is that once upon a time it had a central, basic, or original reference to that part of the anatomy which sits on top of the neck. Its meaning was subsequently extended to cover other kinds of things that sit on top of something else—a head of beer and a head of department would represent extensions of that kind. But as familiar animals with four feet instead of two have their anatomical heads not at the top but at the front, head was extended in a different direction to cover things that stick out (Beachy Head; the head of a procession).

Some such stories can be supported with historical evidence, from written texts representing an earlier state of the same language. The study of how words have in fact or must be supposed to have altered or extended their meanings is the field of historical semantics. But however elaborate the story, however subtle the storyteller, and however copious the documentary evidence, historical semantics can never tell you how any ordinary user of English just knows (a) that head is a word and (b) all of the things that head means.

From this it follows that the word head cannot be translated as a word into any other language. But the meaning it has in any particular usage can easily be represented in another language. In French, for example, you would use cap for “Beachy Head,” mousse for “head of beer,” and chef, patron, or supérieur hiérarchique to say “head of department.” Translation is in fact a very handy way of solving the conundrum of words and meanings. That’s not to say that anyone can tell you what the word means in French or any other language. But what you can say by means of translation is what the word means in the context in which it occurs. That’s a very significant fact. It demonstrates a wonderful capacity of human minds. Translation is meaning.