Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind (Houghton Mifflin; 2008)

+ em + e ("feeling" + "a tendency toward" + adverbial ending) or sen + tern + e ("without" + "topic" + adverbial ending). Thus the sentence La profesoro senteme parolis dum du horoj could mean either "The professor spoke with feeling for two hours" or (horrors!) "The professor rambled on for two hours." The sentence Estis batata la demono de la viro is triply ambiguous; it can mean "The demon was beaten by the man," "The demon was beaten out of the man," or "The man's demon was beaten." Obviously, banishing irregularity is one thing, banishing ambiguity another.

Computer languages don't suffer from these problems; in Pascal, C, Fortran, or LISP, one finds neither rampant irregularity nor pervasive ambiguity — proof in principle that languages don't have to be ambiguous. In a well-constructed program, no computer ever wavers about what it should do next. By the very design of the languages in which they are written, computer programs are never at a loss.

Yet no matter how clear computer languages may be, nobody speaks C, Pascal, or LISP. Java may be the computer world's current lingua franca, but I surely wouldn't use it to talk about the weather. Software engineers depend on special word processors that indent, colorize, and keep track of their words and parentheses, precisely because the structure of computer languages seems so unnatural to the human mind.

To my knowledge, only one person ever seriously tried to construct an ambiguity-free, mathematically perfect human language, mathematically perfect not just in vocabulary but also in sentence construction. In the late 1950s a linguist by the name of James Cooke Brown constructed a language known as Loglan, short for "logical language." In addition to a Wilkins-esque systematic vocabulary, it includes 112 "little words" that govern logic and structure. Many of these little words have English equivalents {tui, "in general"; tue, "moreover"; tai, "above all"), but the really crucial words correspond to things like parentheses (which most spoken languages lack) and technical tools for picking out specific individuals mentioned earlier in the discourse. The English word he, for example, would be translated as da if it refers to the first singular antecedent in a discourse, de if it refers to the second, di if it refers to the third, do if it refers the fourth, and du if it refers to the fifth. Unnatural as this might seem, this system would banish considerable confusion about the antecedents of pronouns. (American Sign Language uses physical space to represent something similar, making signs in different places, depending on which entity is being referred to.) To see why this is useful, consider the English sentence He runs and he walks. It might describe a single person who runs and walks, or two different people, one running, the other walking; by contrast, in Loglan, the former would be rendered unambiguously as Da prano i da dzoru, the latter unambiguously as Da prano i de dzoru.

But Loglan has made even fewer inroads than Esperanto. Despite its "scientific" origins, it has no native speakers. On the Loglan website, Brown reports that at "The Loglan Institute . . . live-in apprentices learned the language directly from me (and I from them!), I am happy to report that sustained daily Loglan-only conversations lasting three-quarters of an hour or more were achieved," but so far as I know, nobody has gotten much further. For all its ambiguity and idiosyncrasy, English goes down much smoother for the human mind. We couldn't learn a perfect language if we tried.

As we have seen already, idiosyncrasy often arises in evolution when function and history clash, when good design is at odds with the raw materials already close at hand. The human spine, the panda's thumb (formed from a wrist bone) — these are ramshackle solutions that owe more to evolutionary inertia than to any principle of good design. So it is with language too.

In the hodgepodge that is language, at least three major sources of idiosyncrasy arise from three separate clashes: (1) the contrast between the way our ancestors made sounds and the way we would ideally like to make them, (2) the way in which our words build on a primate understanding of the world, and (3) a flawed system of memory that works in a pinch but makes little sense for language. Any one of these alone would have been enough to leave language short of perfection. Together, they make language the collective kluge that it is: wonderful, loose, and flexible, yet manifestly rough around the edges.