“Theories Lagos tried to apply to his virus hypothesis.”
“Yes. There are two schools: relativists and universalists. As George Steiner summarizes it, relativists tend to believe that language is not the vehicle of thought but its determining medium. It is the framework of cognition. Our perceptions of everything are organized by the flux of sensations passing over that framework. Hence, the study of the evolution of language is the study of the evolution of the human mind itself.”
“Okay, I can see the significance of that. What about the universalists?”
“In contrast with the relativists, who believe that languages need not have anything in common with each other, the universalists believe that if you can analyze languages enough, you can find that all of them have certain traits in common. So they analyze languages, looking for such traits.”
“Have they found any?”
“No. There seems to be an exception to every rule.”
“Which blows universalism out of the water.”
“Not necessarily. They explain this problem by saying that the shared traits are too deeply buried to be analyzable.”
“Which is a cop out.”
“Their point is that at some level, language has to happen inside the human brain. Since all human brains are more or less the same—”
“The hardware’s the same. Not the software.”
“You are using some kind of metaphor that I cannot understand.”
Hiro whips past a big Airstream that is rocking from side to side in a dangerous wind coming down the valley.
“Well, a French-speaker’s brain starts out the same as an English-speaker’s brain. As they grow up, they get programmed with different software—they learn different languages.”
“Yes. Therefore, according to the universalists, French and English—or any other languages—must share certain traits that have their roots in the ‘deep structures’ of the human brain. According to Chomskyan theory, the deep structures are innate components of the brain that enable it to carry out certain formal kinds of operations on strings of symbols. Or, as Steiner paraphrases Emmon Bach: These deep structures eventually lead to the actual patterning of the cortex with its immensely ramified yet, at the same time, ‘programmed’ network of electrochemical and neurophysiological channels.”
“But these deep structures are so deep we can’t even see them?”
“The universalists place the active nodes of linguistic life—the deep structures—so deep as to defy observation and description. Or to use Steiner’s analogy: Try to draw up the creature from the depths of the sea, and it will disintegrate or change form grotesquely.”
“There’s that serpent again. So which theory did Lagos believe in? The relativist or the universalist?”
“He did not seem to think there was much of a difference. In the end, they are both somewhat mystical. Lagos believed that both schools of thought had essentially arrived at the same place by different lines of reasoning.”
“But it seems to me there is a key difference,” Hiro says. “The universalists think that we are determined by the prepatterned structure of our brains—the pathways in the cortex. The relativists don’t believe that we have any limits.”
“Lagos modified the strict Chomskyan theory by supposing that learning a language is like blowing code into PROMs—an analogy that I cannot interpret.”
“The analogy is clear. PROMs are Programmable Read-Only Memory chips,” Hiro says. “When they come from the factory, they have no content. Once and only once, you can place information into those chips and then freeze it—the information, the software, becomes frozen into the chip—it transmutes into hardware. After you have blown the code into the PROMs, you can read it out, but you can’t write to them anymore. So Lagos was trying to say that the newborn human brain has no structure—as the relativists would have it—and that as the child learns a language, the developing brain structures itself accordingly, the language gets ‘blown into’ the hardware and becomes a permanent part of the brain’s deep structure—as the universalists would have it.”
“Yes. This was his interpretation.”
“Okay. So when he talked about Enki being a real person with magical powers, what he meant was that Enki somehow understood the connection between language and the brain, knew how to manipulate it. The same way that a hacker, knowing the secrets of a computer system, can write code to control it—digital namshubs.”
“Lagos said that Enki had the ability to ascend into the universe of language and see it before his eyes. Much as humans go into the Metaverse. That gave him power to create namshubs. And namshubs had the power to alter the functioning of the brain and of the body.”
“Why isn’t anyone doing this kind of thing nowadays? Why aren’t there any namshubs in English?”
“Not all languages are the same, as Steiner points out. Some languages are better at metaphor than others. Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Chinese lend themselves to word play and have achieved a lasting grip on reality: ‘Palestine had Qiryat Sefer, the “City of the Letter,” and Syria had Byblos, the “Town of the Book.” By contrast other civilizations seem “speechless” or at least, as may have been the case in Egypt, not entirely cognizant of the creative and transformational powers of language.’ Lagos believed that Sumerian was an extraordinarily powerful language—at least it was in Sumer five thousand years ago.”