Explore

In my first year of university, I had the sense that my future was assembling itself into semi-solid form and all I had to do was point myself in its direction as it continued to harden into reality. That future dissolved on the day I stepped into an introductory linguistics course.

Before that day, it had seemed inevitable to me that I would be a writer. This meant writing novels or possibly poetry; I had not yet read other kinds of books that smoldered with aesthetic intensity or set my synapses alight. I chose a class in linguistics not because it sounded interesting (it did not: Its course description made reference to notions such as syntax and grammar, which I had encountered only in desiccated and prescriptive forms) but because it seemed that knowing about such things might be useful for a writer.

I thought I knew a great deal about language already. I had by then wandered in and out of five languages and was adept at comparing and contrasting them. But more than that, I felt I was made of language—that my soul was the product of all the language fragments that had blown my way and accumulated into a semblance of a whole, all of them held together by my ardor for their alchemies of sound and meaning. Nothing else in the world drew the same bodily response from me (I was just beginning to have an inkling that sex might have similar possibilities). I could imagine no version of my self that was not about language. I thought I knew language intimately, in a way that made me possessive of it.

What happened in that linguistics classroom was a shock to me. After the first session or two, I was certain that my life had changed, though I couldn’t have said exactly how. I did know that I was about to abandon my plans of becoming a novelist.

Countless patterns like these lay hidden under the membrane of conscious awareness.

A few years later, I came across the painting by Rembrandt that explained what had come over me. The painting is titled The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, and it depicts the sort of public dissection anyone (who was male, presumably) could attend at the time for a fee. At the center of the image is a cadaver, awash in cold, pale light. The presiding Dr. Tulp has peeled back the skin on the arm of the corpse, revealing its muscle, tendons, and bone. A ring of men, all in black coats, stand on the periphery; several of them lean far into the light, their faces transfixed by the body displayed before them.

All their lives, these men had seen bodies much like the one lying on the slab in front of them, everyday bodies walking, sitting, limping, swinging an ax, hoisting a child, dipping bread into soup, kneeling in prayer, dying. Bodies they knew intimately. But here, under an unflinching light, they were offered a completely new way of seeing a body. And they could see that until this moment they had known nothing.

Here, underneath the skin, they found revelations they hadn’t realized they needed. They could see that blood did not slosh around the body or soak deep into sponge-like tissues, but traveled in its own intricate channels radiating from the heart, gathering to fortify itself within the balloons of lungs. They could see for themselves the secretive machinery that animated all movements, the circuitous journeys that were traced by food and drink. Their faces reflect the religious feel- ing that had not yet begun to bleed out from science; to understand the container of man’s soul, with the help of scalpel and cold, pale light, was to move closer to God.

In that first linguistics class, I had been like one of those men in black, leaning hard into the light. I had not imagined it possible to look under the surface of language in the way we were being taught to look. I had not dreamed of the structures—the systems of cooperating organs—that lay there for anyone to see, once language’s skin was sliced open and peeled back.

It came as a revelation, for example, to learn that all vibrating consonants in my mother tongue of Czech became whispered versions of themselves at the ends of words. When I pointed out to my mother the facts of her pronunciations, in both Czech and English, she was astonished—it’s not the sort of thing anyone ever notices spontaneously, especially about their own mother tongue—and then entranced. (She, too, was a leaner.) I was able to inform her that English sounds also had unstable identities, as with the plural tag on “beds” versus “bets”; although both are written as the letter s, the former is pronounced as a vibrating z, relinquishing a part of its identity to the preceding d sound. Our conversations at that time often veered into my new discoveries of language and her exclamations of wonder and delight when I shared them.

Countless patterns like these lay hidden under the membrane of conscious awareness. An exquisite logic runs through language even at its most disheveled.

How can one not be transfixed by this view into language? To encounter the science of language for the first time is like lying in the dark with a lover of many years, believing that you have already learned most of what is knowable about him, when he turns his face to yours with a certain look. You sense that he is about to crack open the door to hidden rooms inside himself, ones that have long been sealed off from you, that you hadn’t even known were there. Who would not thrill at such an invitation? 

More than a decade after my first encounter with linguistics, after I did not become a novelist but did complete a Ph.D. in linguistics, I took on the mantle of a Dr. Nicolaes Tulp and found myself in classrooms where students were having their own first encounters with the science of language. One day, after I had given the first lecture of the semester, a woman came to the front of the room. She was older than most of the students and had the self-assured air of someone whose identity had stabilized. She thanked me for the lecture, but wanted to let me know she wouldn’t be continuing with the class. It was not at all what she had expected, she explained. This analytical approach, this “dissection of language” (her exact words), was just not for her. “You see, I’m a poet,” she said, by way of explanation.

As if loving language required cultivating a degree of ignorance of it. As if this love would burn up under the cool light of knowing too much. As if to learn more about language risked snuffing out its spark of the divine.

When I started to be serious about linguistics—not just devouring the knowledge produced by others but adding to it as well—the questions that captivated me were ones that dealt with the miracles and mishaps that took place in people’s minds as language passed between them. A sentence was not given whole by one person to another, like an apple or a hunk of bread. It unfurled and revealed itself moment by moment, owing its very existence to the flow of time.

Time struck me as a cruel master, lording itself over language at every opportunity. Here was a speaker rushing to transmute her thoughts into language, preparing to enter the conversation’s relentless stream: mentally laying the foundation of her sentence; choosing this structure from among the many ways she might have expressed the same thought; selecting her words; snapping them into the sentence’s frame; converting it all into the liquidity of speech; all while releasing sounds, drop by drop, into a shared acoustic space. Here was her listener, gathering up those drops one at a time—but quickly, quickly, before they melted into nothingness—and assembling them into a shape capable of yielding meaning, fixing structure and meaning in memory while scrambling to pick up new drops of sound the moment they were released.

A sentence unfurled and revealed itself moment by moment, owing its very existence to the flow of time.

All of it, always, came down to a matter of time. The instruments of my trade allowed me to slice time into the thinnest of increments: I used computer programs to measure, down to the millisecond, how long it took my subjects to read certain words, begin to utter a sentence, respond to a question. I tracked their eye movements to discern where in a sentence their eyes landed and how long they lingered there, or how much time it took them to fix their gaze upon an object while obeying a verbal command. Tracing the path of their eyes over a picture as a narrative unfolded, overlaying eye gaze with speech, I could see how their interpretations were often tightly yoked to the stream of speech, but sometimes lagged behind or stumbled, and sometimes leaped ahead.

Not all of my fellow linguists were as preoccupied as I was with the relationship of language to time. These temporal questions belonged to a subdiscipline known as “psycholinguistics,” a term that always struck me as odd—as if language could ever be disconnected from the psyche, from which it emitted and in which it resided. But many linguists treated language as if it could be, at least for the purpose of examining it. It was useful, they claimed, to view language as a thing unto itself, an abstraction that could be pried away from individual speakers and their circumstances, the limits of their minds, their cultural contexts, even from the strictures imposed by time. Sentences, splayed out in their entirety and frozen in time, were the primary objects of study.

Following the lead of Noam Chomsky of MIT, who had helped to drag the study of language out from the plush lounges of philology departments and under the fluorescent lighting of the information age, they were drawn (and really, who could resist?) by his ambition to discover and describe not just one language, or several, but the very essence of Language. His core insight was that a relatively small collection of mathematical rules for combining words (referred to as a grammar) could expand, universe-like, into a limitless number of sentences, each as unique as a constellation. Moreover, he claimed, these grammars were constrained by a genetic endowment common to all humans. Small variations in this set of rules could yield the abundance of patterns seen across all the world’s languages; the genetic constraints could explain why certain patterns never appeared among the world’s languages while others were found among many. All of this was knowable. Many linguists at the time were electrified by the possibility of capturing the sum total of these rules, of squeezing infinitude into a compressed informational space.

In this grand intellectual project, the mere implementation of language, that is, what happened in the back-and-forth between speakers and listeners—in real time, as we called it—was often seen as mere drag, the equivalent of friction rubbing annoyingly against the purity of the physical forces that held the universe together.

But I could not fathom separating the essence of language from its subservience to time. To think of language as outside time seemed like trying to understand the anatomy of a bird without taking into account the force of gravity that was so determined to pull the creature back to the Earth’s surface. It was like failing to consider that the structure of the bird was the very expression of its struggle against gravity’s unrelenting, unalterable demands. Perhaps you could describe a bird’s structure from this vantage point. But could you ever truly understand why it was the way it was?

Besides, it was not the elegance of mathematics that stirred me. It was my love for language—not as an abstraction, but as an embodied thing, in motion, implemented in, yes, real time. I loved language the way you adore a person, in their details, in the way they have taken control of your senses. I loved how language could shape the vagueness of a human voice into something precise, how easy it was to recognize a familiar voice not just from its timbre but also from its habits of speech—the crisp tap of her t, a slight looseness of the s, the slant of her vowels. I loved how language constantly jolted me—how a sentence could proceed smoothly and unremarkably and then upend all rational expectations, whether through its own genius or its own clumsiness. I loved the sweaty effort of forming a sentence and the satisfaction when it flew straight and landed clean. 

Would Nicolaes Tulp’s anatomy students have been so moved by their first dissection if they had never loved any particular human body, if they had not thrilled at its grace and prowess, been stricken with anxiety at signs of its frailty? If they had not experienced the strains and pleasures of their own bodies?

I wanted my study of language to stay close to my own experience of it, sweetly imprisoned as it was by time.

As my chosen field of psycholinguistics grew more sophisticated at studying language in “real time,” it became all the more apparent that language, in its everyday use, involves a frantic negotiation between future and past, though we ourselves are trapped in those pinhole moments between what has been uttered and what has yet to be spoken. How do you create something coherent from these minuscule fragments of ever-changing sound? Your grasp of syllables, let alone entire words or sentences, depends on your ability to imagine the future and remember the past, to knit together the two non-existent tenses in order to hold still a meaning that is hurtling itself through time.

Every sentence you utter illustrates the problem. Before you speak, you must have a sense of what you are going to say. To convert ideas into language takes time. Like a sculptor, you carve your sentence from a block of thought, first hacking out the coarse outline of its shape, then chiseling in the details of specific words, then refining its surface of sound.

I loved how a sentence could proceed smoothly and unremarkably and then upend all rational expectations.

Unlike the product of a sculptor’s labors, though, your creation is not made of material that can persist through time. You must form an utterance before you can speak it, but even as it forms in your mind, it rushes from future to past; its shape is already a memory even before you have opened your mouth. As best you can, you try to fix its image in memory as you prepare to speak it. But a full sentence in all its detail contains more information than your memory can easily hold, and if you wait until your sentence is completely formed in your imagination before you begin to utter its first syllable, it will have already begun to dissolve.

To outrun its decay, you begin to utter the first portion of the sentence while hurrying to put the finishing touches on the portions that will come later. Indifferent to your struggles, the future bears down on you. At times, your planning lags behind your speech: You reach the point in a sentence where you are to utter a certain word, only to find that you have not yet decided on what it will be; all you can do is vocalize an empty sound (uhhh … ) to mark its place until you complete your work. At other times, you have rushed and your tongue slips; in your haste to ready your material for speech, you have lined up the wrong word or sound or syllable.

You are constantly ferrying between past and future; to choose the word or phrase you are going to say, you have to leap back into memory and conduct a frantic search. You can’t spend too much time there, because the future will be here any instant. You reach for the first word that comes to mind, the most common phrase, a word you have just heard, whatever lies at the top of the memory heap. You speak, hoping for the best.

Time is no kinder when it is your turn to listen. As your interlocutor’s sentence streams into the nonexistent past, you strain to hold its image in memory. To forestall the sentence’s inevitable decay, you rush to squeeze meaning out of it as soon as words begin to spill from the speaker’s mouth. Sometimes this task is complex, and it takes some time to translate language into thought; then you risk being buried under a new avalanche of incoming speech. Sometimes, this task is simple; then your mind is freed from the burden of holding on to the past and so you leap into the future. Before the sentence has revealed its shape, you predict the form it might yet take. This too requires shuttling between tenses, because predictions themselves rely on memories—how else do we know what to expect in the future, other than by remembering what we have encountered before? If your prediction turns out to be correct, all is well. If it is not, you stumble, take time to recover. In the meantime, more speech has piled up on top of you.

In this back-and-forth, pressed between the walls of past and future as they close in on each other, language seems a fragile thing, in constant danger of being crushed.

If language’s shape is an expression of its imprisonment in time, then so is a human life. At some point—in those years while I was completing my studies, building a new lab and reputation as a young professor, waking at four in the morning to prepare my lectures, birthing and raising children, being whiplashed by the joys and torments of an increasingly untenable marriage—it occurred to me that my intellectual preoccupations with language’s struggles against time were contained within the same pinholes as my own struggles to create a sense of coherence from the fragments of my present.

I’d had the sense, from that first day in my linguistics class, that language was the true container of the human soul—and therefore worthy not only of reverence but also of dissection and examination under all available light. 

The more I studied it, the more lessons it offered about what it is to live a human life. Language was proving to be an archaeological site of the human condition. By patiently sifting through its layers, one could discover not just our urge to enter other minds, or the inevitable gulfs that remain between us, but also what it means to live within the substance of time. 

Excerpted from Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love by Julie Sedivy. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2024 by Julie Sedivy. All rights reserved.

Lead image: Anna_Dorokhova and Arrobani Studio / Shutterstock

• Julie Sedivy

  Posted on October 17, 2024

  Julie Sedivy is a language scientist who has taught at Brown University and the University of Calgary. She is the author of Memory Speaks: On Losing and Reclaiming Language and Self. Her latest book, Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love, will be released in October 2024.

Get the Nautilus newsletter

Cutting-edge science, unraveled by the very brightest living thinkers.