George Steiner's After Babel babble.

George Steiner is dead. I am now a dozen years older than he was when he published 'After Babel'. I can no longer believe that 'To understand is to decipher. To hear significance is to translate." What is understood is something one has locked away secure from one's own tampering. It is a 'black box'. To hear significance is to stop translating because that which is truly significant ends the interrogation.

By the time I read Steiner in the late Eighties, the idea that language was strategic and deceptive was mainstream- at least for economists. After all, our discipline was merely a 'costly signal' of a type which advertised one's stupidity or sycophancy and suitability for employment in some dreary Bureaucratic Ponzi scheme.

 Literature was a business and Translation was a business. Steiner's anguish at the fate of the dialect of the Mitteleuropean bildungsburgertum seemed histrionic. There was good writing in Hebrew. What was better still, belle lettrism no longer had any class connotation. It was merely a matter of taste. Paideia had no role as, to quote Canetti, a cordon sanitaire against Nazi monsters from the Id. One pitied the pedants who had to take up that metaphor and turn it into a meta-metaphor which they were obliged to then batter out their own brains with.

Steiner died in the age of Wikipedia and Google Translate. Any fool can now piece together an erudite seeming paper based on a couple of random web-searches. There may well be A.I's which can turn out pages of pseudo Steiner. What is not possible, however, is to simulate the mind, the voice, the subjectivity behind dreck like this-

If we postulate, as I think we must, that human speech matured principally through its hermetic and creative functions, that the evolution of the full genius of language is inseparable from the impulse to concealment and fiction, then we may at last have an approach to the Babel problem.

If written by an A.I, this is clearly nonsense. If a language has a 'genius' then it can't have evolved. An A.I would know this. Steiner didn't- or did know it but couldn't care less if he wrote nonsense.  Suppose one were to try to repair Steiner's statement, what would we get? 'The fitness landscape for human language militates for secrecy, deception and aesthetic ornamentation which may have these two features. This helps us understand why Languages are constantly splitting off from each other and becoming mutually incomprehensible.' One could say this is the 'shibboleth' theory of language. It enables 'separating equilibria' based on costly to acquire signals. Steiner's parents had brought him up to be polyglot. But this would not have saved him from the Gas Chamber. It was their decision to relocate to America which preserved his life and which enabled him to flourish as a savant in Class Conscious England.

All developed language has a private core.

Do Computer languages have a private core? Do any human languages used by strangers encountering each other in places of business? Suppose this were the case. Then what is to stop me suing McDonald's for racial discrimination? After all, the smiling young gentleman who handed me my order said 'Have a nice day'. Other people heard him do so. Now, to me, the 'private core' of this utterance is 'Fuck off back to Pakistan you big fat nigger bastid'. Thus I am entitled to 12 million dollars in damages or as many burgers I can eat till I die of Diabetes. Clearly, language would lose its usefulness if we accepted the postulate that utterances have a 'private core'.

How does Steiner justify this absurd notion? He appeals to some crazy Russian who invented a language called 'zaum'.

According to Belimir Khlebnikov, the Russian futurist who thought more deeply than any other great poet about the frontiers of language, "Words are the living eyes of secrecy."

As opposed to the dead eyes of his audience who were openly grateful to get the fuck away from him.

They encode, preserve, and transmit the knowledge, the shared memories, the metaphorical and pragmatic conjectures on life of a small group - a family, a clan, a tribe.

When I was a kid, I was jealous of my sister who was good at learning furrin languages like French and German. So I made up my own language and said things like 'Goo aghezi moi'. Then Mummy made me stop because she hadn't read Khlebnikov. She didn't know I was creating my own 'zaum'. But every imbecile has such a language. It does not 'preserve and transmit' anything at all.

Mature speech begins in shared secrecy, in centripetal storage or inventory, in the mutual cognizance of a very few.

Mature speech begins when babies stop babbling and start forming words and sentences as accurately as they are able. If you imitate the cute syntax of a kid, the kid gets angry and demands you speak properly.

In the beginning the word was largely a pass-word, granting admission to a nucleus of like speakers.

There was no need for this because hunter gatherer groups knew each other by sight.

'Linguistic exogamy' comes later, under compulsion of hostile or collaborative contact with other small groups.

The reverse must be the case. Related groups would want to keep in contact for the exchange or reproductive and other resources. The 'regret minimizing' strategy would be to participate in 'Creoleization' to a greater or lesser extent depending on pathogen avoidance and tragedy of the commons type considerations.

We speak first to ourselves, then to those nearest us in kinship and locale.

Steiner used to talk to himself. Then his relatives would turn up to audit his lectures. It was not the case that he went to University and then to an even more prestigious University and that only after he sounded like other Professors did any students audit his lectures.

We turn only gradually to the outsider, and we do so with every safeguard of obliqueness, of reservation, of conventional flatness or outright misguidance.

I suppose Oxford and Cambridge must have seemed insular and buttoned up to a young man arriving from Harvard. But it was Steiner- a Franco-American- who turned to these 'outsiders' and who won them over by his erudition and eloquence.

At its intimate centre, in the zone of familial or totemic immediacy, our language is most economic of explanation, most dense with intentionality and compacted implication.

But that zone of immediacy is largely non-verbal or else features a phatic delight in language for its own sake. We either say everything without saying anything or else give tongue to exuberance like larks.

Streaming outward it thins, losing energy and pressure as it reaches an alien speaker. In the process of external contact a pidgin must have arisen, an interlingua minimally resistant to current, predictable needs of economic exchange, of territorial adjustment or joint enterprise.

Pidgins arise where marriages are between people of different mother tongues. But, by the time babies grow up a little, there is a swift 'Creoleization' which generates a language as rich as any other.

Under certain circumstances of combinatorial advantage and social fusion, this 'amalgam at the border' will have developed into a major tongue. But at many other times and places contact will have atrophied and the linguistic separation between communities, even neighbouring, will have deepened. Otherwise it becomes exceedingly difficult to account for the proliferation of mutually incomprehensible tongues over very short geographical distances.

Scarcity and pathogen avoidance explains why this will happen in some 'Zomias' while the reverse will occur over vast distances where trade and exchange are profitable.

In brief: I am suggesting that the outwardly communicative, extrovert thrust of language is secondary and that it may in substantial measure have been a late socio-historical acquirement.

It may be that pastoralists trading cattle or horses or practicing transhumance devoted a portion of their surplus to maintaining a bardic class who had an interest in creating a synthetic 'refined' language. It is likely that such pastoralists also took with them children of agricultural elites who would grow healthy and strong by drinking plenty of milk. There is a story that something like this happened to the Prophet of Islam. More generally, Agriculturists might invest some of their surpluses in training some of their own in the 'elite' language of the warrior pastoralists. Island hopping Mariners may have had mechanisms to inhibit linguistic development precisely because there was no 'discoordination' game involving pathogen avoidance or scarcity.

As for why languages tend to diverge, this is simply a statistical question regarding cascading 'errors'. Indeed, before modern ideas of 'genetic drift', the Linguists had their Grimm Laws.

The primary drive is inward and domestic. Each tongue hoards the resources of consciousness, the world-pictures of the clan.

The word 'horde' is Turkic and is the same as the word 'Urdu'. Hordes did hoard gold and other precious things. They might also capture the totems and idols of rival tribes. But the 'world-pictures' of the clan became tribal, national, Imperial and, in some cases, crystallized as Universal Religions. Because male polygamy for warrior elites is a highly successful reproductive strategy, the primary drive of languages is outward and political, not inward and domestic. Even where monastic religions are involved, kin selective altruism means that the genes of the monkish literary savant get spread faster. Translation becomes a heavy industry in such hands. Universities and 'print capitalism' cause 'run-away' processes such that an entire Weltanshauung can be transformed within a couple of generations. 

Using a simile still deeply entrenched in the language-awareness of Chinese, a language builds a wall around the 'middle kingdom' of the group's identity.

But that Wall was breached. First the Mongolians- like Kublai Khan- then the Manchus ruled China and became Sinicized. But China had never tried to stop other nations- the Koreans, the Japanese etc- from adopting and adapting Chinese paideia for their own administrative and soteriologicial purposes. The only reason China could build a 'great wall' was because of its administrative unity under a highly literate class of scholar/ soldiers.

It is secret towards the outsider and inventive of its own world.

Tibet, perhaps, had this characteristic. China did not. Indian or Tocharian or Jesuit monks were welcome to learn Chinese and translate their own texts into that language.

Each language selects, combines and 'contradicts' certain elements from the total potential of perceptual data. This selection, in turn, perpetuates the differences in world images explored by Whorf.

This is the soi disant Sapir-Whorf thesis. Oddly, there is some evidence that people in different countries may see color differently. But this is not a linguistic phenomena. Still, at one time people would say things like 'because of the nature of the Chinese language, that country will never produce great mathematicians or physicists. Their thinking is too concrete. Abstraction makes them pull out their pig-tails in frustration.'

Language is 'a perpetual Orphic song' precisely because the hermetic and the creative aspects in it are dominant.

Very true! I recall visiting Stratford on Avon. Shakespeare's head happened to be floating by. His perpetual Orphic song was very nice. Sadly, I had drunk too much cider and can no longer remember his melodious Sonnet about Mrs Thatcher, the milk snatcher.

There have been so many thousands of human tongues, there still are, because there have been, particularly in the archaic stage of social history, so many distinct groups intent on keeping from one another the inherited, singular springs of their identity, and engaged in creating their own semantic worlds, their 'alternities'. Nietzsche came very close to unravelling the problem in a somewhat cryptic remark which occurs in his early, little-known paper 'Über Wahrheit und Luge im aussermoralischen Sinne': "A comparison between different languages shows that the point about words is never their truth or adequacy: for otherwise there would not be so many languages."

Nietzche was a shite philologist. 'On Truth and Lies in a non-moral sense' is worthless. Protocol bound juristic processes are not necessarily moral. A tort is a tort even if perpetrated by a Saint. Even in the absence of juristic processes, common sense- or 'the folk theorem of repeated games'- tells us that 'tit for tat' is salutary and reputation enhancing. A lie, in the 'non-moral' sense, is a fake signal. Either it is punished or there is a new separating equilibrium which screens out 'cheap talk'.

Nietzche, poor booby wrote-  What is a word? It is the copy in sound of a nerve stimulus. 
Steiner must have watched films like 2001 in which computers or robots spoke. He must have known that a 'nerve stimulus' doesn't have a copy in sound or sight or the akashic ether.
But the further inference from the nerve stimulus to a cause outside of us is already the result of a false and unjustifiable application of the principle of sufficient reason. 
But so is the principle of sufficient reason which has no reason to exist save to permit Liebniz to shit higher than his arsehole.
If truth alone had been the deciding factor in the genesis of language, and if the standpoint of certainty had been decisive for designations, then how could we still dare to say "the stone is hard," as if "hard" were something otherwise familiar to us, and not merely a totally subjective stimulation!
But the same point may be made about saying lying is the deciding factor in the genesis of language.
 We separate things according to gender, designating the tree as masculine and the plant as feminine. 
Germans do. We don't.
What arbitrary assignments! How far this oversteps the canons of certainty! We speak of a "snake": this designation touches only upon its ability to twist itself and could therefore also fit a worm. 
A convention is not arbitrary. As David Lewis had pointed out in the Sixties, it may be the Schelling focal solution to a coordination problem.
What arbitrary differentiations! What one-sided preferences, first for this, then for that property of a thing! The various languages placed side by side show that with words it is never a question of truth, never a question of adequate expression; otherwise, there would not be so many languages. 

The reverse must be the case, otherwise no useful Scientific discovery made by speakers of one language could have an equally useful translation in another language. It is a different matter that some ways of 'carving up Reality according to its joints' may be better than others. Scientific subjects may prefer to retain terms from one particular classical language- e.g. Greek terms in Medicine.

Or to put it simply: there is a direct, crucial correlation between the 'un-truthful' and fictive genius of human speech on the one hand and the great multiplicity of languages on the other. 

There is a great multiplicity of nose shapes. Some people even get 'nose jobs'. Does this mean there is a 'direct, crucial correlation' between the diversity of nasal appendages and the fictive genius of my farts such that they delude everybody else into thinking they smell bad and I'm a great big farty-pants who should no longer be invited to dinner parties? If Steiner were alive, he might defend this proposition. Sadly, he is dead and I fart mournfully in memory of a savant who never knew the role my farts have played in keeping Nazism at bay over the course of my fifty seven years of existence on this planet. The rest is Silence. Sorry, just tooted again. Now the rest is Silence. Damn! Well, third time's the charm.