Signifiers is a series of posts based around unique examples of lexical or typological interest from languages around the world, alternative conceptual threads which can inform new understandings of our experience.
If you go down a path of knowledge specialization — a researcher, a scientist, any kind of expert — you are typically encouraged to silo yourself, to get to a high degree of specialization and expertise in something specific and valuable so that you can leverage that highly specialized knowledge for your personal benefit or very specific advances to your field.
But you also, in the beginning and in points along the way, have a need to branch out, to make interdisciplinary connections, to adapt insights from the avant garde of one discourse to your own knife’s edge, and to map narrow advancements back to your individual and our collective understanding of source epistemologies.
This is why, I’d argue, there is a need for comparative linguists to communicate more directly and specifically with other kinds of scientists, artists, and creative knowledge workers. We just know a lot about the basic medium of meaning — the formal, conceptual, and semantic structures which underpin any other kind of knowing — and we ought to be better involved in the generation of new concepts and new conceptual metaphors, given the extent of our knowledge about what various groups of humans have already done in their languages.
Novel scientific insights, new understandings of the nature of the world, often require the development of new concepts, and the development and explanation of concepts derives from various kinds of grammatical, semantic, and conceptual metaphor.
I try to avoid making strong Whorfian claims, but certainly when it comes to the use of metaphor to generate new scientific or cultural concepts, we map existing conceptual material to new domains, and are therefore limited to the conceptual, lexical, and grammatical material present in our own languages.
Metaphors make meaning. We have a metaphor inventory. It can be expanded upon.
Knowing more about the structural possibilities developed over millenia in parrallel tracks of human collective cognitive development (other languages) ought to then provide a greater resource pool for the development of new conceptual metaphors. But we need the medium of high metalinguistic awareness with comparative grammatical and semantic interpretation, which is where linguistic typology has something to add.
This idea — that knowledge of conceptual structures (or the conceptual structure of grammatical structures) from other languages can provide new opportunities for creativity and understanding — is all over this lands.internal project. But I’ll provide an example that’s fairly accessible and makes the point: numeral classifiers.
In English, we have a distinction between count and mass nouns, whereby count nouns can be… counted… and mass nouns cannot be unless you put them in a container. In other words, I can talk about three dogs (a count noun) but not three milks (a mass noun), and I need instead to count the containers, i.e. three glasses of milk or three gallons of milk or three kinds of milk.
Grammatically, when we do this, the container (glass, gallon, kind) becomes the head of the noun phrase, and the thing being counted (of milk) becomes more like a modifier. We end up with a distinction between substance and form/container that is not there when we count a count noun, as in three dogs.
But there are languages where all nouns have to be counted the way that we count mass nouns in English. We refer to systems that require markers of shape/form/category when counting a noun as numeral classifier systems. Numeral classifiers are common in East Asia, Southeast Asia, Mesoamerica, and the Indigenous Pacific Northwest, although they occasionally show up elsewhere. I’ll describe the Japanese classifier system since it’s probably the bets studied.
A basic primer on Japanese Numeral Classifiers
Numeral classifiers are an essential component of the Japanese language, used to count and specify the quantity of nouns. Japanese requires a specific classifier to be paired with a numeral based on the type of object being counted. This system is deeply ingrained in the language and covers a wide range of categories, such as animals, flat objects, long objects, people, and abstract items.
For example, when counting people, the classifier "人" (nin) is used, as in "三人" (san-nin) for three people. For small animals, the classifier "匹" (hiki) is used, such as in "二匹" (ni-hiki) for two dogs. When referring to long, cylindrical objects like pencils or bottles, "本" (hon) is the appropriate classifier, as seen in "四本" (yon-hon) for four pencils. For thin, flat items like sheets of paper or plates, "枚" (mai) is used, exemplified by "五枚" (go-mai) for five sheets of paper.
To be clear, there are times when you could just say “三人” to mean ‘three people’ — that would just be the numeral and numeral classifier. But if you want to say ‘three Americans’, that would be 三人のアメリカ人, which is composed of the numeral+classifier 三人, a preposition の, and アメリカ人 amerika-jin ‘American person’ — you could very literally translate this as “three persons of Americans”, much like you would say “three glasses of milk”.
In Japanese, different classifiers used with the same head noun can produce distinct meanings. Let's take the noun "紙" (kami), which means "paper," as an example:
三枚の紙 (san-mai no kami): Here, "枚" (mai) is the classifier used for flat, thin objects like sheets of paper. This phrase means "three sheets of paper."
三本の紙 (san-bon no kami): In this case, "本" (hon) is the classifier for long, cylindrical objects. This phrase could refer to "three rolls of paper," such as wrapping paper or wallpaper.
三冊の紙 (san-satsu no kami): The classifier "冊" (satsu) is used for bound objects like books or notebooks. This phrase might be interpreted as "three notebooks made of paper" or "three paper notebooks."
The fact that the classifiers can change with different head nouns gets you to the real conceptual underpinning of the system. In the paper example, what you can really see is that the head noun, paper, denotes substance, while the classifier denotes form or shape or container. Paper is also a mass noun (substance) in English, although it has count noun uses (I read two papers yesterday). But the pattern described for paper is just as true of nouns that would surely be configured as count nouns in English, like rabbit, or its Japanese counterpart 兎 usagi:
匹 (ひき, hiki) - Used for living rabbits. Example: 三匹の兎 (さんびきのうさぎ, san-biki no usagi) - Three (living) rabbits
頭 (とう, tō) - Used for rabbit corpses, often in the context of hunting or meat. Example: 二頭の兎 (にとうのうさぎ, ni-tō no usagi) - Two rabbit carcasses
枚 (まい, mai) - Used for rabbit pelts or skins. Example: 一枚の兎 (いちまいのうさぎ, ichi-mai no usagi) - One rabbit pelt
The obligatory nature of numeral classifiers in Japanese and languages like it is the basis of one of the stronger examples of a successful neo-Whorfian study. In several experiments, researchers have shown that Japanese and English speakers vary in their non-linguistic behaviors regarding categorization, wherein Japanese speakers tend to group like items by substance, and English speakers by shape.
There has been substantial study of numeral classifier systems and what they tell us about cognitive processes related to individuation and categorization of entities. I’ll likely write more about those topics in the future, but I want to go straight to the bigger pattern that numeral classifiers create: a formal distinction and mapping between conceptual content and embodied form, between idea and container that allows us to think of otherwise concrete or individuated entities as something more like a substance, something more like milk, or water.
What would it mean to see rabbit as a substance and not an individuated entity? What can it mean for a concept of rabbit to be realized in different forms, as a living small animal, as a head, as a sheet?
If a person were to be a substance rather than a form, could they be embodied in something other than a human body?
If genetic lineage is conserved in DNA, which acts as conceptual information not yet embodied, can many different conceptual entities be realized in the same form? As in the process of carcinisation, where everything evolves into the shape of a crab at least once in the life of its lineage?
Different religious lineages — Christianity, Shaivism, Islam, Manicheanism, Polynesian or Greek Polytheism, Taoism, Animisms the world over — defined by collections of narratives, symbols, population lineages, and cultural values, all have ended up with both monist and dualist interpretations. Monism, which posits a unity of being of all reality, and dualism, which separates spirit form material and creator from creation, are found as theological underpinnings of thinkers and sects within every large religious lineage. So, when we see the monism of Ibn Arabi and Adi Shankara, is this the concept of monism in the cultural forms and embodiments of Islam and Hinduism, respectively, or are the cultural ideas of Islam and Hinduism embodied in a monist container? I’m not seeking or asserting an answer, only noting that this conceptual approach can yield new mechanisms for understanding.
The reason that many languages map this container-to-concept relation only when counting is because it is only in counting that concepts need necessarily be embodied and individuated. But the existence of such explicit and elaborated linguistic systems (compare individuation questions in Welsh collective nouns) simply continue to raise questions about the capacity, necessity, and opportunity to reformat idea and concept into a new reflection of material realty.