Ever since middle school, one of my favorite poems has been “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll. I still have it completely memorized—I remember how odd I found the words, like “Bandersnatch” and “whiffling,” and the images that would pop up in my imagination even though I really had no idea what these words meant.
One of the first ideas that Carnie brings up is that of Universal Grammar—the idea that humans may have an innate facility for Language. Throughout the rest of the reading, I found this concept fascinating, since it seems to inform and underlie many of the ways we use Language. I want to focus on the compelling idea that humans can understand parts of speech and Language used in non-traditional ways, even though they are not grammatically correct. Carnie gives the example “The yinkish dripner blorked quastofically into the nindin with the pidibs,” suggesting that a native English speaker would be able to classify these nonsensical words into parts of speech.
This example struck me as startlingly similar to the verses in “Jabberwocky” (“’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: / All mimsy were the borogoves, / And the mome raths outgrabe”). As a child, I surely did not understand what this stanza really meant, yet I had vivid images in my mind—the “toves” were “slithy” creatures, and they playfully “gyred and gimbled” in their home, the “wabe.” I, too, was able to separate Carroll’s words into different parts of speech. It was fascinating, then, to read Carnie’s explanation—that the parts of speech are not semantically defined, but more reliant on the affixes of the words and their positions in the sentence. Are we unconscious of this ability of ours to perform classification in such a way, and is this tied back to the concept of Universal Grammar and an innate ability for Language?
This is tied to chapter 2 of the reading, where Carnie introduces yet another notion relevant to the idea of nonsensical words and meaning—open versus closed parts of speech. It seems particularly interesting that we might be able to make up words like “internet” and “grody,” which are open class and allow new forms that people can adopt. The words in “Jabberwocky” seem to fit into this category—it seems no great barrier for us to start using a word like “wabe” to describe a specific kind of habitat or environment, if only we could agree on what “wabe” would refer to. However, I noticed that “Jabberwocky” did not include parts of speech that were closed class—for instance, new determiners or conjunctions. Was Carroll consciously thinking about only including new open class words versus closed class words? Or is this another example of the way we use Universal Grammar to inform our Language choices? The idea that we can interpret and create Language, even when words are nonsensical, is truly captivating.
I really love this comparison, Katherine, because I've had similar experiences. I was also a big Carroll fan growing up, and I remember discussing in class when I was younger what we thought "nonsense words" would mean if they were real. For instance, we would be asked what we thought the word "slube" would be; I think I decided it was a kind of sludgy mud; I knew straight away, however, that it was definitely a noun. A few years later, I remember having my Language Arts teacher tell me my grasp of grammar was one of the best in the class, but I had never really LEARNED any grammar, I just knew how it worked and didn't understand that other people didn't. Carnie's explanation for the innateness of Language was eye-opening in how we finagle out real words from fake.
ReplyDeleteAs yet another childhood fan of the fantastical world of Lewis Carroll, I continue to be fascinated by the linguistic whimsy that suffuses his writing. The colorful characters boldly throw themselves loose of the shackles of linguistic convention: “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.” Despite Humpty Dumpty’s brags, there remains a sort of governing logic in the nonsense which makes it all the more interesting. As you’ve noted, the made up words in Jabberwocky are all open class words that abide by standard grammatical rules. Further, many of the words are portmanteaus created by blending separate existing words, which creates an illusion of familiarity. A “chortle,” for example, sounds halfway between “chuckle” and “snort,” and “galumph” recalls “gallop” and “triumph.” It seems Carroll was opening our eyes to the room for creativity and flexibility within our linguistic system rather than rejecting it altogether in favor of nonsense.
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