‘The myth of language universals’ is the title of a 2009 paper by the linguists Nicholas Evans and Stephen Levinson, who argued that the world’s six to eight thousand languages share “vanishingly few” universal features, and that the idea of a universal grammar common to all of them does not survive the evidence. For them the diversity of languages is the most remarkable fact about human language. Therapeutic Shamanism agrees that the way one language divides up the world is not the only way, and places what humans share deeper than words.
What is the ‘myth of language universals’? #
The phrase comes from a long paper published in 2009 in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences by Nicholas Evans of the Australian National University and Stephen Levinson of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Its target was an assumption that had grown out of the linguist Noam Chomsky’s work, that underneath their different sounds and vocabularies all human languages are built to one common design, a universal grammar. The paper opens with the psychologist Steven Pinker’s summary of that view: according to Chomsky, a visiting Martian scientist would conclude that, apart from their vocabularies, Earthlings speak a single language.1
Evans and Levinson’s reply is in their first sentences. Talk of universals has given cognitive scientists the impression that languages all follow a common pattern, but “there are vanishingly few universals of language in the direct sense that all languages exhibit them.” The claims of universal grammar, they wrote, “are either empirically false, unfalsifiable, or misleading”, the last because they describe tendencies, not rules that hold everywhere.1 See Who is Noam Chomsky, and what does linguistics say about how language shapes thought?
How different can languages be? #
Far more different than most people suppose, on the evidence the paper gathers from decades of work by field linguists. Some languages have fewer than a dozen distinctive sounds and others about a dozen dozen, whilst sign languages, the languages of the deaf, use no sounds at all. Some languages have no word for ‘if’ or for ‘or’; some have no word for ‘blue’ or ‘green’, or for ‘hand’ or ‘leg’. There are languages without tense, without numbers, and without pronouns for ‘he’, ‘she’ or ‘they’. Some have thousands of verbs and others about thirty.2
Languages also make their speakers notice things that English leaves alone. In some, every statement has to say how the speaker knows it: whether they saw it, heard or felt it, were told about it, inferred it, or know it as an established fact. In others a speaker cannot use a pronoun without first working out how the people being spoken of are related to each other.2
Space gives the clearest case. Numerous languages have no words for ‘to the left of’ or ‘in front of’. A book is not on the table to the left of the window, but on the table to the north of it, described by the land and the compass and not by the speaker’s own body. Speakers of such languages, Evans and Levinson report, also remember where things are in the terms their language uses.2
What do Evans and Levinson put in place of a universal grammar? #
History, culture and learning. Where patterns do recur across languages, they hold, they are better understood as “stable engineering solutions”, good answers found again and again to the same problems of making a language work, shaped both by the history of each culture and by the limits of the human mind.3 So the patterns are not a blueprint carried in the genes.
Their positive claim is that diversity itself is the thing to explain. “The diversity of language is, from a biological point of view, its most remarkable property”, since no other animal has a way of communicating that varies in both form and content from one group to the next; it shows how flexible and how capable of learning human beings are.3 And the diversity is being lost. Most of the world’s languages are spoken by small groups, and the paper repeats the reckoning of the reference work Ethnologue that a language dies every two weeks. There have probably been at least half a million human languages, so the languages spoken today are a sample of less than two per cent of all the human ways of speaking there have ever been.4
On whether language shapes thought, they are careful. Differences in how languages describe space go along with differences in how their speakers think about space when not speaking, “suggesting that linguistic distinctions affect how we think.”3 See What did Sapir and Whorf actually claim about language and thought?
Is the argument accepted? #
It is still argued over, and the journal printed the argument together with twenty-three replies from other researchers. The psychologist Michael Tomasello went further than the authors, under the title “Universal grammar is dead”. Steven Pinker and the linguist Ray Jackendoff, defending a universal language faculty, agreed with much of the paper, including that linguists had been too quick to assume universals, but held that it exaggerated diversity. A survey that dwells on differences whilst “taking commonalities for granted” is, they wrote, “myopic”, because it ignores all the conceivable kinds of language that never occur.5
Evans and Levinson answered their critics in the same issue, holding to their case and arguing that putting cultural evolution at the centre makes learning, not an inborn grammar, the key to how humans come by language.5
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
In the idea that a language is one way of dividing the world up, among many. Language is largely a middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer thing, and largely left-brained: it is about labelling and defining, about how we divide the middle-world up and make concepts of it.6 Evans and Levinson show from the world’s languages how differently that dividing can be done, so the way English carves things up is one way among thousands, not the human way. Words define and shape how we perceive things, and the dominant culture knows this very well.7
The loss Evans and Levinson describe has a shamanic side too. Shamanism was practised all over the world, so every tribe had, or would have had, its own word for it; in England the original word has long been lost, and the word used in English today was borrowed from a Siberian language in the 1600s.8 Because the West killed its shamans, it lost its own terms for what they knew, and has had to borrow words from other cultures, such as ‘wetiko‘ for the destructive, psychopathic energy that shamans once kept in check.9 See What part do silence, words and names play?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see differently? #
In where it looks for what humans share. Evans and Levinson find little that is universal in grammar, and they make no claim about how any people experiences the world beyond what its language codes; their subject is the structure of languages. Therapeutic Shamanism holds a universal of a different kind. Shamanic cultures across the world, however different, describe very similar practices and beliefs, a core beneath the cultural trappings of each, so consistent that it is “almost as if” they were innate, hard-wired into us.10 See Who was Michael Harner, and what is core shamanism?
That shared core does not live in grammar. Deep Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer journeys are mostly beyond words, because human language is largely a middle-world thing; they work through sensation, imagery and metaphor, which is why GuidesGuides. The Lower-World and Upper-World beings a practitioner works with and learns from, of whom the Power Animal is the first and foremost. True Guides are ethical to their core; the shaman’s power comes from the depth of these bonds, not from the shaman. More about this in the Lower-World rarely speak.11 On this view languages may differ as widely as the linguists find, at the level where the middle-world is divided up and named, whilst what is met beneath words is common to people everywhere. See Why are there no words or symbols in the Lower-World?
