Red ochre has been used to reveal some untranslatable aspect of the user's identity since before there were Homo sapiens.
Inspired largely by reading Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and an essay on the problems of translating Dante into Arabic (abstract here), last week’s post (here) asked when and why did languages become untranslatable? This week proposes an answer.
Last week I remarked on a few oddities about language that complicate translation even at the level of pidgin tongues:
Arbitrariness of objects. One language can have one word that includes baboons and vervet monkeys, while another might have a separate word for each animal. Reality is what it is, but there are no absolute ways for categorizing its objects. Translators are confronted with the challenge of getting from one arbitrary way of slicing up reality’s joints to another way.
Ambiguity of phenomena. Categorizing a phenomenon is just as arbitrary as an object, but the category is often ambiguous as well because it rests on perceptions with nothing external to point out. For example, the difference between knowing a place and knowing how to prove a theorem cannot be defined by pointing a finger.
The diagram below shows how two cultures can face the same phenomenon, have some overlapping perception of it, and yet attend to different elements. Sure, some phenomena are so arresting (e.g., gunshots) or so general (e.g., eating) that all cultures will be able to direct attention to them, but many other phenomena are so unobtrusive (e.g., the difference between feasting and devouring) that we cannot expect every culture to express them. What is a translator to do in a case where languages do not share these subtleties?
Yet translating devour into a language that distinguishes only between eating and feasting is hard but not impossible. A few adjectives, or maybe a simile—he ate like a hungry wolf—should suffice. The translation problem becomes still harder, however, when phenomena go beyond ambiguous to become private. I ran away describes something public, while I got the creeps is knowable only to the speaker.
If words pilot attention, their most remarkable ability is the capacity to point a listener to the private, otherwise undiscoverable world of the speaker. This undiscoverability seems to apply even if the speaker and listener are the same person. Of course a person without language can still feel fear or "get the creeps," but can a languageless creature direct its attention internally so that it knows it is afraid or has the creeps?
A dog may know some district of London in great detail, but is unlikely to ever have the fact drawn to his attention. He knows London, but doesn’t pay attention to the fact. Meanwhile, a person can say in response to a question, "Yes, I do know London." Speech has directed the person's attention back on himself, This capacity for self-attentiveness marks a great difference between attention-based systems of communication and symbolic systems. Self-knowledge is not an automatic side-effect of symbol processing.
The rise of self-attentiveness introduced something new into the world. Our ape ancestors could pursue their interests with great shrewdness, they could deliberately make themselves look ferocious or sympathetic, as the moment demanded, they could probably recognize themselves in a pool’s reflection, but they couldn’t direct their attention so that they could take a look at their private selves. When humans could do so, it was as though a new sense had evolved, although its basis is linguistic rather than genetic.
The challenge to anyone speaking about private things is to find an apt way to direct the listener's attention to that private reality. Metaphors are crucial to the task. The diagram below shows how they work. Speakers use metaphors to direct a listener's attention to something public that will direct the listener inward.
For example, suppose I notice something about myself, perhaps I feel especially good in an unusual and distinctive way. I want to draw somebody else’s attention to my state. How do I do that? I could tell you that I feel smilkerish, coining a word to name my condition. Unfortunately, you would have no idea what I was talking about. I must translate my feeling into something public, perhaps The sun is warming my heart, and to understand me you have to realize that you should look into yourself rather than just at the public world.
We take for granted this capacity to look two ways at once. The Bible says God "hardened" pharaoh's heart and even people who claim to take the Bible literally understand that we are being told something about pharaoh's feelings, not his anatomy. But using metaphors requires an unusual power. Many autistic people cannot do it to this day and, when it was new, it probably required some neurological adaptations. Metaphor is a solution full of costs and trade-offs, but without it language cannot make the private world public.
One of the costs of metaphor is the rise of the untranslatable tradition. Suppose one tradition uses the sun metaphor to express a sense of special joy while another uses the metaphor, The wind has kissed my shoulder. Other related metaphors will follow and over time there will be two cultural traditions that build on separate sets of associations. Perhaps the second tradition will develop mostly painful associations with the sun and refer to the heart only with a general word used for the parts of a carcass that are considered inedible. A literal translation of the sun-heart metaphor might be merely confusing in the second tradition. A translation that uses the wind-shoulder metaphor might be more accurate but will lose whatever associations the first tradition has developed with sun and heart. When neither a literal nor a poetic translation can tell us exactly what a speaker has said, language has become untranslatable.
When did metaphor enter speech and move language onto the road of untranslatability? As a first approximation I'm guessing that pidgins/protolanguages do not allow metaphor, so metaphor appeared whenever the human line moved beyond protolanguage. Indeed, for all I know, metaphorical requirements may have pushed us to full language.
Of course it would be jolly if there were some physical evidence to support this account of the rise of untranslatability. There is nothing conclusive, but there are facts that are “consistent with” a scenario that supposes Homo erectus spoke pidgin while Homo sapiens has always spoken true language. The words spoken by those ancestors are lost to the wind, so any evidence that might appear would be indications that between erectus and sapiens new behaviors based on self-attentiveness began to appear.
The three dominant facts about the period just before the rise of H. sapiens are
- the split with the Neanderthal line that took place 400 or 500 thousand years ago,
- the rise of the use of ochre as a body marker (perhaps as much as 280 thousand years ago), and
- the addition of adolescence to the human life stage (about 200 thousand years ago).
The last two details suggest responses to self-attentiveness and the issues of identity that such attention provokes.
Body marking remains to this day a way to physically transforming oneself and revealing an otherwise invisible identity, whether it be something as simple and temporary as wearing ashes on the forehead during the first day of Lent or taking on a gang tattoo.
Adolescence is a peculiarly human life stage in which people are biologically mature, but do not yet have a culturally mature role. Typically, during this period they ceremonially come of age and find where they will fit into society. So it would seem that issues of identity did arise in our lineage prior to the appearance of the sapiens line.
That history does not prove that untranslatability had entered speech, but at least it does not contradict it, and the self-attentiveness made possible by speech offers a plausible explanation for what was happening. It also points toward some intriguing differences with Neanderthals. Their lineage predates the rise of self-attention and true language, so they may have spoken only a pidgin and not have had to wrestle with the tension between self-attention and group loyalty that has always perplexed humanity.
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