A language, in other words, could be thought of as a container in Boltzmann’s example: if a new element is introduced – for instance a new word, or a change in the pronunciation of an old word – the language functions like a system whose equilibrium has been disturbed. It seeks a new rest state. But the interconnectedness of language terms means that, for the system to accommodate a new or changed element, a lot of other elements need to change in order to compensate. Languages, like any system, seek ‘equilibrium’. The research of Trubetskoy and Jakobson showed (and later research by other linguists confirmed) that changing some parts of a language caused a chain reaction. Their research was limited to sounds that differentiate meaning, or ‘phonemes’, rather than whole words; but it revealed a number of relationships between these phonemes that held, no matter what language they belonged to.
Trubetskoy’s theory of phonology showed that certain phonological features are universally coupled with certain others, or are lost in the absence of others. In practice, these relationships are very abstract – it is almost impossible to describe them in layman’s terms. For example, in all languages vowel length is irrelevant as a signifier of meaning unless stress becomes fixed, in which case vowel length does become significant.
The unintuitive nature of these changes makes them all the more intriguing, however, and they are difficult to explain without recourse to some notion that the unconscious language organ of our brains is a great deal more complicated and sophisticated than we thought. In fact, it was subsequently proved that sound changes always happen in groups, indicating that language changes are not isolated, but each necessitates a chain reaction of further changes to compensate for the original shift.4
Between 1350 and 1700, for example, virtually all vowels in Middle English became diphthongs, one after the other, in what has become known as the biggest documented ‘chain shift’ in modern linguistics, when several sounds move stepwise along a phonetic scale. Other such chain shifts were found in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Germany: most famously, stop consonants became fricatives – i.e. b became f, d became th or ts, and g became h.5 The regularity of sound changes indicated that there are pre-set paths that languages have to follow as they develop and change over time. This lent the notion of linguistic structuralism an almost metaphysical, teleological significance.6
‘Many elements of the history of languages seem fortuitous,’ wrote Trubetskoy to Jakobson,
but history does not have the right to be satisfied with this explanation. The general outlines of the history of language, when one reflects upon them with a little attention and logic, never prove to be fortuitous. Consequently, the little details cannot be fortuitous either – their sense must simply be discovered. The rational character of the evolution of language stems directly from the fact that language is a system.7
As we have seen, Trubetskoy created his theory as an oddly obsessive riposte to the deceased Professor Shakhmatov, who, in 1915, had written a historical treatise on the reconstruction of ‘Proto-Slavic’ – what was proposed as the language that had existed before Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian split into separate dialects and then languages, sometime in the Middle Ages.
Shakhmatov was ‘never able to free himself from its influence: perhaps unwittingly, he always imagined the development of language as the branching of a family tree’, according to Trubetskoy, who presented an elaborate reconstruction of the creation of Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian in the thirteenth century through his advanced study of phonemes. He showed that from 1160 onwards, certain vowels shifted their pronunciation in the southern region of what is now Ukraine, a change that spread slowly to the north. According to a surviving manuscript that documented the sound shift, by the time it arrived there in 1282 other changes had already taken place in the southern region’s pronunciation (the hardening of soft consonants before syllable-forming front vowels); and these prevented the spread of certain sound changes over the entire Old Russian language area, such as the transformation of e into o in Ukrainian. That was the beginning, Trubetskoy showed, of a separate Ukrainian dialect.8
Trubetskoy argued that the dialects of Ukrainian and Belarusian thus emerged for entirely internal linguistic reasons, and were not caused by some external historical factors, such as migration, war or politics. In his view, then, language repeatedly demonstrates that it moves on a completely separate plane of existence from history, changing, spreading, expanding and dying out according to its own internal ‘systemic’ logic, rather than being conditioned by the hurly-burly of physical cause and effect.
Trubetskoy and Jakobson both mused regularly that the systemic laws they were finding in language could apply to many other aspects of human culture as well. The same principles they discovered in phonemic systems might pertain to a vast system of communication and art, such as dance, music, folklore, literature, poetry and myth. As Trubetskoy wrote to Jakobson: ‘There can be no doubt that some parallelism in the evolution of the various aspects of culture exists, so some law concerning parallelism also exists. Thus, for instance, the entire evolution of Russian poetry… has inner logic and meaning; no moment of this evolution should be derived from non literary facts.’
If taken to their furthest limits (and Russian intellectuals had a tendency to take their theories to the furthest limits), Trubetskoy’s findings seemed to arrive at a paradox: because of the existence of universal linguistic laws, there were sufficient grounds to ask whether human culture was something universal itself.
Phonology was therefore the key to a new universe. Trubetskoy believed that culture, like nature, could have its own structuring principles, hidden and unconscious DNA, and that subtle variations at a deep genetic level could give rise to the different species that multiplied through nature, a regularized geometry of autonomous units – discrete cultures and linguistic groups, whose inner workings do not assimilate foreign elements in a straightforward manner. Each such creation would thus traverse its own autonomous path of development, spreading and existing entirely within an internally organized system. Culture was not a product of independent human minds, of chance or of external causal forces: it was an immanent system of laws and structures which decisively condition our cultural, artistic, literary and linguistic identities. Operating below the threshold of consciousness, this rule-bound system held up a mirror to the inner workings not just of the individual human mind, but also of the collective, simultaneous activity of communities and nations.
The academic work of Trubetskoy and Jakobson would ultimately result in what Jakobson termed the ‘Eurasian Language Union’ and the notion that inner Eurasia was one gigantic basin in which a system of interconnected languages flowed together, sharing more and more deep structural traits over time. Trubetskoy went a step further and proposed a ‘Eurasian cultural conglomerate’ – the notion that this boundary applied not just to languages but to overall culture. Within these boundaries nations and civilizations lived as hermetically sealed totalities, rather than sharing a common wellspring of universal nature with the rest of humanity.