To be perfect, a language would presumably have to be unambiguous (except perhaps where deliberately intended to be ambiguous), systematic (rather than idiosyncratic), stable (so that, say, grandparents could communicate with their grandchildren), nonredundant (so as not to waste time or energy), and capable of expressing any and all of our thoughts.[28] Every instance of a given speech sound would invariably be pronounced in a constant way, each sentence as clean as a mathematical formula. In the words of one of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century, Bertrand Russell,
in a logically perfect language, there will be one word and no more for every simple object, and everything that is not simple will be expressed by a combination of words, by a combination derived, of course, from the words for the simple things that enter in, one word for each simple component. A language of that sort will be completely analytic, and will show at a glance the logical structure of the facts asserted or denied.
Every human language falls short of this sort of perfection. Russell was probably wrong in his first point — it’s actually quite handy (logical, even) for a language to allow for the household pet to be referred to as Fido, a dog, a poodle, a mammal, and an animal — but right in thinking that in an ideal language, words would be systematically related in meaning and in sound. But this is distinctly not the case. The words jaguar, panther, ocelot, and puma, for example, sound totally different, yet all refer to felines, while hardly any of the words that sound like cat — cattle, catapult, catastrophe — have any connection to cats.
Meanwhile, in some cases language seems redundant (couch and sofa mean just about the same thing), and in others, incomplete (for example, no language can truly do justice to the subtleties of what we can smell). Other thoughts that seem perfectly coherent can be surprisingly difficult to express; the sentence Whom do you think that John left? (where the answer is, say, Mary, his first wife) is grammatical, but the ostensibly similar Whom do you think that left Mary? (where the answer would be John) is not. (A number of linguists have tried to explain this phenomenon, but it’s hard to understand why this asymmetry should exist at all; there’s no real analogy in mathematics or computer languages.)
Ambiguity, meanwhile, seems to be the rule rather than the exception. A run can mean anything from a jog to a tear in a stocking to scoring a point in baseball, a hit anything from a smack to a best-selling tune. When I say “I’ll give you a ring tomorrow,” am I promising a gift of jewelry or just a phone call? Even little words can be ambiguous; as Bill Clinton famously said, “It all depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” Meanwhile, even when the individual words are clear, sentences as a whole may not be: does Put the hook on the towel on the table mean that there is a book on the towel that ought to be on the table or that a book, which ought to be on a towel, is already on the table?
Even in languages like Latin, which might — for all its cases and word endings — seem more systematic, ambiguities still crop up. For instance, because the subject of a verb can be left out, the third-person singular verb Amat can stand on its own as a complete sentence — but it might mean “He loves,” “She loves,” or “It loves.” As the fourth-century philosopher Augustine, author of one of the first essays on the topic of ambiguity, put it, in an essay written in the allegedly precise language of Latin, the “perplexity of ambiguity grows like wild flowers into infinity.”
And language falls short on our other criteria too. Take redundancy. From the perspective of maximizing communication relative to effort, it would make little sense to repeat ourselves. Yet English is full of redundancies. We have “pleonasms” like null and void, cease and desist, and for all intents and purposes, and pointless redundancies like advance planning. And then there’s the third-person singular suffix -s, which we use only when we can already tell from the subject that we have a third-person singular. The -s in he buys, relative to they buy, gives you no more information than if we just dropped the -s altogether and relied on the subject alone. The sentence These three dogs are retrievers conveys the notion of plurality not once but five times — in pluralizing the demonstrative pronoun {these as opposed to this), in the numeral {three), in the plural noun (dogs versus dog), in the verb (are versus is), and a final time in the final noun (retrievers versus retriever). In languages like Italian or Latin, which routinely omit subjects, a third-person plural marker makes sense; in English, which requires subjects, the third-person plural marker often adds nothing. Meanwhile, the phrase Johns picture, which uses the possessive -’s, is ambiguous in at least three ways. Does it refer to a picture John took of someone else (say, his sister)? A photo that someone else (say, his sister) took of him? Or a picture of something else altogether (say, a blue-footed booby, Sula nebouxii), taken by someone else (perhaps a photographer from National Geographic), which John merely happens to own?
And then there’s vagueness. In the sentence It’s warm outside, there’s no clear boundary between what counts as warm and what counts as not warm. Is it 70 degrees? 69? 68? 67? I can keep dropping degrees, but where do we draw the line? Or consider a word like heap. How many stones does it take to form a heap? Philosophers like to amuse themselves with the following mind-twister, known as a sorites (rhymes with pieties) paradox:
Clearly, one stone does not make a heap. If one stone is not enough to qualify as a heap of stones, nor should two, since adding one stone to a pile that is not a heap should not turn that pile into a heap. And if two stones don’t make a heap, three stones shouldn’t either — by a logic that seemingly ought to extend to infinity. Working in the opposite direction, a man with 10,000 hairs surely isn’t bald. But just as surely, plucking one hair from a man who is not bald should not produce a transition from notbald to bald. So if a man with 9,999 hairs cannot be judged to be bald, the same should apply to a man with 9,998. Following the logic to its extreme, hair by hair, we are ultimately unable even to call a man with zero hairs “bald.”
If the boundary conditions of words were more precise, such reasoning (presumably fallacious) might not be so tempting.
Adding to the complication is the undeniable fact that languages just can’t help but change over time. Sanskrit begat Hindi and Urdu; Latin begat French, Italian, Spanish, and Catalan. West Germanic begat Dutch, German, Yiddish, and Frisian. English, mixing its Anglo-Saxon monosyllables (Halt!) with its Greco-Latin impress-your-friends polysyllables (Abrogate all locomotion!), is the stepchild of French and West Germanic, a little bit country, a little bit rock-and-roll.
28
Forgive me if I leave poetry out of this. Miscommunication can be a source of mirth, and ambiguity may enrich mysticism and literature. But in both cases, it’s likely that we’re making the best of an imperfection, not exploiting traits specifically shaped by their adaptive value.