You are what you say – well, maybe, up to a point. Every voice carries certain personality traits – the tongue-tiedness of one; of another, the overreaching vowels. Every voice, in preferring dinner to supper, or in pronouncing this as dis, betrays traces of its past. But vocabulary is not destiny. Words, regardless of their pedigree, make only as much sense as we choose to give them. We are the teachers, not they. To possess fluency, or “verbal intelligence,” is to animate words with our imagination. Every word is a bird we teach to sing.
Eventually diagnosed with high-functioning autistic savant syndrome and synesthesia (only one of fifty with this particular diagnosis in the world), Daniel Tammet sees the world in a unique way: assigning colours to feelings and connecting more to numbers than to letters as a way to describe his inner life. Every Word is a Bird We Teach to Singis the fourth nonfiction book Tammet has written from this unique perspective, and perhaps that means he has stretched his personal material a little thin at this point – perhaps he doesn't want to rehash the details he has written about before, but which I haven't read – so while I did find everything he assembled in this varied look at languages around the world to be interesting, I was most interested in his personal stories, which didn't last long enough for me.
From the beginning, Tammet writes that, though raised in London, English always felt like a second language that didn't belong to him – his long undiagnosed autism causes “a disconnect between man and language” and he was constantly translating experience into his private language of numbers. It wasn't until he started reading that he began to visually connect the look of words to their meanings (which gave him a unique way to essentially teach himself his mother tongue), but still, he privately wrote poetry composed of only numbers. To demonstrate his savant abilities, in 2004 Tammet correctly recited the first 22, 514 digits of pi (a European record) in front of a live audience over five hours:
As I gathered momentum, acquired rhythm, I sensed the men and women lean forward, alert and rapt. With each pronounced digit their concentration redoubled and silenced competing thoughts. Meditative smiles broadened faces. Some in the audience were even moved to tears. In those numbers I had found the words to express my deepest emotions. In my person, through my breath and body, the numbers spoke to the motley attendees on that bright March morning and afternoon.Tammet, who now lives in Paris with his French husband, discovered along the way that reading Dostoevsky in French translation freed him from self-consciousness and allowed him the pleasure of “learning new words and discovering new worlds”. Tammet had eventually realised that the same method he had used to teach himself to read English – exploring the character of a new word instead of literally translating it – would be the key to learning any new language. Tammet recalls being a nineteen year old volunteer ESL teacher in Lithuania and teaching the women in his class via this method (ie, getting them to explore “sn” and “sm” words – snicker, sneer, smile, smirk – and recognise that they're all focussed on the mouth), and along the way, he picked up Lithuanian. I loved the chapter in which Tammet discovered a poet, Les Murray, whose words struck him to the core, only to learn that Murray is also a high functioning autistic man. I found it fascinating that when Tammet was given the nod to translate Murray's poetry into French, Tammet understood that translating the character of the words (the visual arrangement of consonants and vowels, the mix of tall and short and rounded letters, internal assonance) was vastly more important than literally translating the words and imagery (and that Murray was okay with that). I was fascinated by everything up to this point, but suddenly, the book becomes about Tammet travelling around the world, speaking to experts about their languages. Abruptly, Tammet is in Mexico City, talking with a man who is a native speaker of Nahuatl – the language of the Aztecs and their descendants – a culture that “revered the power and the magic of sounds”:
Mexico City (then Tenochtitlán) was always booming , ringing, resounding in the days of Montezuma's glory. The wind whistled, the Aztecs – with flutes and ocarinas – whistled; to the tinkling of a rain shower they added the tinkling of their bracelets, anklets, ceramic pendants and beads; after a night ablare with thunder, a morning of horns and conches, copper gongs and tortoiseshell drums. Singers in iridescent feathers roared like jaguars, squawked like eagles, cooed like quetzals. Mellifluous orations, “flower songs”, offered the listener color and beauty, and could inspire and pacify.Tammet then meets with native Esperanto speakers, speaks with an African author who thinks all African literature should be written only in African languages, and then goes to Iceland and learns that there is a committee that not only scours the media for the intrusion of Icelandic-corrupting slang, but they also must approve every potential baby name as authentically Icelandic before a birth certificate can be issued. Tammet meets with those on the Isle of Man who have resurrected the Manx language from the 1940s recordings of the handful of native elderly speakers who had still lived on the island at the time, meets with the first Englishman elected to the French Academy (which curates the definitive list of what words are authentically French and enforces their use), and while everything to this point seems to be about the protection of languages under threat – and especially under the threat of encroaching American slang – the book then takes another turn, with Tammet meeting with people who approach language in a more intentional manner. He describes the OuLiPo movement (a method of writing within restraints, which Tammet writes about within restraints), and then learns sign language (I did find it interesting that the two people he meets don't consider themselves to be part of the official Deaf culture: the man, because he has a cochlear implant and has regained his hearing; and the woman, because she was taught to lipread as a child and therefore regrets that “her brain had been made to resemble that of a hearing person's”). Tammet speaks with a man who translates the Old Testament from the original Hebrew into German, and then with people who study the emergent grammar of telephone conversations, and ends with speaking with those who are writing computer programs that simulate human speech – as it turns out, they may never pass the Turing Test. And then the book ends rather abruptly with this conversation with Mark Bickhard (a Professor of Cognitive Robotics and the Philosophy of Knowledge ):
Humans in conversation, he concludes, update and modify social reality from moment to moment. Meanings are broached, negotiated, tussled over. Big things are at stake. Computers, on the other hand, inert and indifferent, “can't care less” about meaning. It is this can't-care-less-ness that will forever keep them imitating people's words.Without a concluding chapter, or a thesis statement beyond the book's title, it's hard to parse what Tammet's ultimate goal was. I most enjoyed stories of Tammet's personal relationship with language, and while I appreciate the importance of protecting threatened languages as a vital expression of the unique cultures that produced them, I couldn't really see a connection between the last few sections of the book and what came before. And yet, it was all interesting, and as a collection of the ideas that fired up Tammet's remarkable brain, it was always rewarding to tag along with the author as he pursued those ideas.
I care about the philosopher's words. They can change me, and I let them. When I turn off my laptop it feels warm. I notice that. Not the warm of a friend's hug or handshake; only of electricity, I think. But without it, how much less of the world's meaning would our brains transform, convert?
