Less Than Words Can Say | Page 8

both passive and active forms, but they consider it a serious
breach of etiquette amounting almost to sacrilege to use the active form
when speaking of persons. In a child, the use of the active voice in the
first person singular is taken somewhat less seriously, but it is still
discouraged as a mark of arrogance or aggressiveness. Indeed, their
words for ``angry'' and ``insane'' both contain an element of the ending
that goes with the first person singular in that conjugation most often
used by young children. They do not say: ``I am eating my worm.''
They say rather: ``With regard to the worm unto me, there is an
occasion of eating.'' Animals and objects, however, are normally found
as subjects of active verbs. The sun rises and the worm crawls, subject
only to those forms available to that person who is saying those things
and to whom he says them.
Their language sounds terribly complicated, and it is. It is every bit as
complicated as English, or any other language, for that matter. All
languages are complicated beyond hope of complete description. When
it seems to us that German is less difficult to learn than Arabic, what
we have noticed is not that German is less complicated than Arabic but
that German is the more like English. Speaking his language is the
most complicated thing a human being does, and should he undertake
to go even further and learn to read and write it, he multiplies one
infinitude of complications by another. It is an awesome marvel that
anyone can do any of these things, never mind do them well.
Nevertheless, billions of people speak and understand a language. In
fact, unless there's something wrong, every human being there is speaks
and understands at least one language. Every member of Homo sapiens
ever born spoke and understood a language, unless, of course, he died
too soon or was in some special way disabled. The ability to use
language is included in the meaning of sapiens. We have no other way
of beingsapiens except through language. The Jiukiukwe may lack

barbecue pits and some of our other things, but they are every bit as
sapiens as the inhabitants of Manhasset. They have all it takes.
Still, they are different from the inhabitants of Manhasset in many ways.
The material differences come easily to mind, since the Manhassetites
have not only barbecue pits but much more, but there is a much more
important difference than that. It is this: In the same circumstance, the
Manhassetite will say, ``I want food'' and the Jiukiukwe will say, ``As
for me, there is hunger.'' Every other difference is because of this
difference; this is the difference between the Manhassetites and the
Jiukiukwe, the difference from which all smaller differences flow.
The Manhassetites speak a language in which the typical statement
takes the form of a sentence that names a doer and his deed. The most
common elaboration also names the ``object'' of his deed. ``I want
food'' displays exactly the typical structure of the most ordinary
Manhassetite utterance. The structure may be modified and elaborated
in many ways, some of them quite extensive and complicated, but it
remains the enduring skeleton of the typical statement: A doer does
something, often to something or someone. The continuous
reappearance of this structure has taught all Manhassetites a particular
view of the world and man's place in it. They understand the world as a
place where doers do things. That is why many of them will get raises
next year and dig bigger barbecue pits.
The Jiukiukwe, on the other hand, have been taught by the basic
structure of their language that doing is properly the business of the
things in the world around them. Nor do they think of themselves,
again because of their grammar, as the ``objects'' of the things that are
done in the world. For the Jiukiukwe, the inanimate or animal doers of
deeds do them at most ``insofar as he is concerned,'' as though he were,
if not always an unaffected bystander, at least no more than
accidentally related to what happens in the world. The Jiukiukwe are
just there ; the world does its things around them, sometimes ``in their
case.''
They will not get any raises next year, and you can easily see why they
have no barbecue pits to enlarge. Technological change comes about

when somebody does things to something. The Jiukiukwe have always
lived, and will always live, exactly as they do today. Their technology
will not change unless the basic structure of their language changes,
although it may also be possible that the basic structure of their
language would change should their technology change. There's no way
of knowing which must come first, if either, but it seems