The Happiness of Pursuit: What Neuroscience Can Teach Us About the Good Life by Shimon Edelman Page A
Authors: Shimon Edelman
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much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.
ROMEO
Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?
JULIET
Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.
ROMEO
O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;
They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.
JULIET
Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.
ROMEO
Then move not, while my prayer’s effect I take.
Thus from my lips, by yours, my sin is purged.
ROMEO kisses JULIET
JULIET
Then have my lips the sin that they have took.
ROMEO
Sin from thy lips? O trespass sweetly urged!
Give me my sin again.
ROMEO kisses JULIET again
JULIET
You kiss by the book. 8
The Digital Revolution
Like a soccer match overrun by spectators who spill over onto the field, chase away the referee and the teams, and tear up the turf, a language game without order and structure would quickly devolve into verbal chaos. There being no pattern in mayhem for a novice participant or an outside observer to discern, a game that is prone to disorder is unlikely to survive as a meme: such games become extinct just as soon as they coalesce out of the background noise of their hosts’ behavior.
Whereas in a disorderly game each melee is chaotic in its own inimitable (and therefore unlearnable) way, in a well-structured game all rounds resemble each other. All instances of the game of Go are played out with pieces that differ only in their color; all soccer matches involve one ball each; all wedding ceremonies decrease the number of unmarried people by no more than two at a time. In language use too, there are certain structural traits that hold for all conversations and for the language game in general.
The most obvious such trait is the serial order in which language is generated and perceived. In spoken language, it reveals itself in the sequential structure of speech: sounds follow one another in an order that matters, often accompanied by a series of gestures and facial expressions that are likewise ordered and timed. Meddling with the order of the sounds is generally a recipe for total communication breakdown. Meaning may merely mutate, as when “kiss” pronounced backwards becomes “sick,” or as “you kiss by the book” may be turned into “you book by the kiss” by a spoonerism-prone novice Juliet, gripped by stage anxiety. Meaning is far more likely, however, to vanish altogether: an overwhelming majority of conceivable sound combinations are not just meaningless but unpronounceable.
Although the ordering of words is what first comes to mind when one thinks about its sequential nature, language is serial on more than one level. Sequences of basic sounds or “phones” form words, which in turn can be strung one after another to form phrases and sentences. As phones are produced and perceived by the members of a linguistic community who share a dialect, they are channeled into a small number (no more than a few dozen) of distinct categories—the phonemes. All human languages, as they are spoken (or signed), are in this sense digital: they are constructed from discrete building blocks in the same way that the file into which I am writing these words exists in my computer’s memory as a sequence of physical symbols for 0 and 1. 9
Getting the phonemes right may be quite a tough job for a non-native speaker. Having been brought up speaking Russian, I, for one, will always be challenged by some of the phonetic distinctions that English mandates. (The need to avoid making tricky distinctions explains my otherwise puzzling tendency while speaking English to substitute whenever possible “page” for “sheet” and to refer to the German philosopher Kant, with whom I never actually drank bruderschaft, as “old Immanuel.”) At the same time, I am told that in Hebrew, which I speak as fluently as any native, I sound like an
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.
ROMEO
Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?
JULIET
Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.
ROMEO
O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;
They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.
JULIET
Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.
ROMEO
Then move not, while my prayer’s effect I take.
Thus from my lips, by yours, my sin is purged.
ROMEO kisses JULIET
JULIET
Then have my lips the sin that they have took.
ROMEO
Sin from thy lips? O trespass sweetly urged!
Give me my sin again.
ROMEO kisses JULIET again
JULIET
You kiss by the book. 8
The Digital Revolution
Like a soccer match overrun by spectators who spill over onto the field, chase away the referee and the teams, and tear up the turf, a language game without order and structure would quickly devolve into verbal chaos. There being no pattern in mayhem for a novice participant or an outside observer to discern, a game that is prone to disorder is unlikely to survive as a meme: such games become extinct just as soon as they coalesce out of the background noise of their hosts’ behavior.
Whereas in a disorderly game each melee is chaotic in its own inimitable (and therefore unlearnable) way, in a well-structured game all rounds resemble each other. All instances of the game of Go are played out with pieces that differ only in their color; all soccer matches involve one ball each; all wedding ceremonies decrease the number of unmarried people by no more than two at a time. In language use too, there are certain structural traits that hold for all conversations and for the language game in general.
The most obvious such trait is the serial order in which language is generated and perceived. In spoken language, it reveals itself in the sequential structure of speech: sounds follow one another in an order that matters, often accompanied by a series of gestures and facial expressions that are likewise ordered and timed. Meddling with the order of the sounds is generally a recipe for total communication breakdown. Meaning may merely mutate, as when “kiss” pronounced backwards becomes “sick,” or as “you kiss by the book” may be turned into “you book by the kiss” by a spoonerism-prone novice Juliet, gripped by stage anxiety. Meaning is far more likely, however, to vanish altogether: an overwhelming majority of conceivable sound combinations are not just meaningless but unpronounceable.
Although the ordering of words is what first comes to mind when one thinks about its sequential nature, language is serial on more than one level. Sequences of basic sounds or “phones” form words, which in turn can be strung one after another to form phrases and sentences. As phones are produced and perceived by the members of a linguistic community who share a dialect, they are channeled into a small number (no more than a few dozen) of distinct categories—the phonemes. All human languages, as they are spoken (or signed), are in this sense digital: they are constructed from discrete building blocks in the same way that the file into which I am writing these words exists in my computer’s memory as a sequence of physical symbols for 0 and 1. 9
Getting the phonemes right may be quite a tough job for a non-native speaker. Having been brought up speaking Russian, I, for one, will always be challenged by some of the phonetic distinctions that English mandates. (The need to avoid making tricky distinctions explains my otherwise puzzling tendency while speaking English to substitute whenever possible “page” for “sheet” and to refer to the German philosopher Kant, with whom I never actually drank bruderschaft, as “old Immanuel.”) At the same time, I am told that in Hebrew, which I speak as fluently as any native, I sound like an
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