On "Lexicon," "la gran pregunta," and getting lost in translations

Haspelmath offers an introduction to varying components of morphology, such as lexemes, word-forms, paradigms, and word families, and how these concepts interrelate and overlap. A lexeme, or an “abstract entit[y] that can be thought of as sets of word-forms” (Haspelmath 1), are the functionality-based definitions that line dictionary pages. The word-forms – i.e. what we commonly consider to be a “word,” – that belong under a certain lexeme’s umbrella is a paradigm, while a word family goes the opposite direction and is an overarching category of related lexemes. I found the segmentation of words and phrases into such individual pieces fascinating, reminding me of a book I once read called Lexicon, by Max Barry. The premise of the novel science-fiction-ifies the idea of morphology, giving different morphemes (a part of a word that has a specific meaning, like read and –s in reads) and lexemes the power to control certain people, in accordance with their personality, when uttered in the correct order. While the mind-controlling trait of Lexicon was just slightly hyperbolic, Haspelmath’s analysis of morphological components and how they contribute to the human perception of semantics couldn’t help but align with how drastically our thinking is structured and dominated by the language we use.

Slobin, however, went on to emphasize the variation in languages, rather than their universality, and especially how those languages vary in storytelling: “Languages differ systematically in rhetorical style – that is, the ways in which events are analyzed and described in discourse” (Slobin 223). He explains that “typological characteristics of morphosyntax and lexicon [(heh)] [are] often allied with cultural narrative practices” (Slobin 223), which he then proves in his examination of uses of pure path verbs (e.g exit or ascend) vs. manner verbs (e.g. run or crawl) in V-languages and S-languages, respectively. What intrigued me most, though, was how he illustrated that these divisions in language use directly contributed to the cultural formations of stories: “In his Australian frog stories… there is great attention to path details… based on the importance of journeys in Australian Aboriginal culture” (Slobin 242). It reminds me of the Robert Frost quote “Poetry is what gets lost in translation,” and, like poetry, stories constantly vary even with something as small as the substitution of synonyms. Now, Atkins and Levin explore synonyms to an even more extreme degree, gleefully comparing the verbs “quake, quiver, shake, shiver, shudder, tremble, and vibrate” (Atkins and Levin, 86), emphasizing the difference in “syntactic behavior… regard[ing] transivity  (Atkins and Levin, 96).

With these readings in mind, I am obsessed with the idea of evolving storytelling, the preservation of cultures and ideas, and the fluidity of language that allows for both such progression and conservation. I’m currently in a class on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and we recently wrote an essay comparing two conflicting copies of the play, possibly cobbled together by clerks in printing offices or distractedly transcribed by a player like something out of The Shakespeare Stealer. How is Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” speech transformed by the fact that one synonym for “fardles” was exchanged for another in a later draft? How does “to be or not to be? That is the question” shift in meaning when it gets remade as “¿Ser o no ser? Esa es la gran pregunta,” as it was on my elementary school Spanish room’s wall? I’d love to examine the linguistic shift in recordkeeping over time in societies, as even the slightest morphological change can clearly reinvent the semantics of a sentence.