Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

A code, or cipher, is a way of representing a piece of information in a way that is receivable only if the (secret) key to the code is available. However sophisticated the key, however complicated the algorithm that turns the “source” into “code,” there is always a discoverable relationship between the expression in code and the encoded expression. If a language itself is a code of that kind, what does it encode? There’s only one possible answer in the long Western tradition of thinking about language since the time of the Greeks, and that answer is: meaning (sometimes called “thought”). A translation machine would need to strip away from the actual expression in language A all that is “code,” so as to access the real thing that it encodes, namely, the actual, irreducible, plain, and basic meaning of the expression. It’s really no more than a rehearsal of the ancient idea that language is the dress of thought. Weaver himself proposed the following analogy:

Think of individuals living in a series of tall closed towers, all erected on a common foundation. When they try to communicate with one another, they shout back and forth, each from his own closed tower. It is difficult to make the sounds penetrate even the nearest towers, and communication proceeds very poorly indeed. But when an individual goes down his tower, he finds himself in a great open basement, common to all the towers. Here he establishes easy and useful communication with the persons who have also descended from their towers.[147]

That dream of “easy and useful communication” with all our fellow humans in the “great open basement” that is the common foundation of human life expresses an ancient and primarily religious view of language and meaning that has proved very hard to escape, despite its manifestly hypothetical nature. For what language would humans use to communicate with one another in the “great open basement”? The language of pure meaning. At later stages in the adventure of machine translation and modern linguistics, it came to be called “interlingua” or “the invariant core” of meaning and thought that a communication in any language encodes.

The task that machine-translation pioneers set themselves was therefore almost identical to the task of the translator as expressed by many modern theorists and philosophers: to discover and implement the purely hypothetical language that all people really speak in the great open basement of their souls.

How was that to be done by machines? Plenty of intellectual machinery already existed that seemed designed for the purpose. Ever since the Romans started teaching their young to read and write Greek, language learners in Western tongues have always been told they have two basic tasks: to acquire vocabulary in the foreign tongue, and to learn its grammar. That’s why we have bilingual dictionaries separate from our grammar books, which give the set of rules by which the “words” in the vocabulary may be combined into acceptable strings. That’s what a language is, in our ancient but undimmed language theology: a Meccano set, made up of one part nuts, bolts, girders, beams, cogwheels, and perforated bars (let’s say, prepositions, verbs, nouns, adjectives, particles, and determiners) and, for the other part, rules about how to fix them together. A nut goes on a bolt but not on a cogwheel, just as a verb clicks on a subject before and an object after …