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The incursions
Ce qui traverse le livre sans avoir son chapitre
Des langues qu'on croise en chemin, et des systèmes de signes qui ne sont pas des langues mais qui posent exactement les mêmes questions. Ils reviennent d'un chapitre à l'autre, en encadré, en note, en contre-exemple.
Langues croisées
Trois langues en passant
Ancient Greek
The alphabet that invented vowels
The Phoenicians wrote only consonants; the Greeks recycled the letters they had no use for to write vowels, and writing became readable aloud by someone who did not already know the text. The Latin alphabet, the Cyrillic one and ours all descend from that piece of tinkering. Greek returns in nearly every chapter: for Homer, for grammar (the categories we still use were cut for it), and for learned vocabulary.
Polish
Seven cases, and consonants stacked up
Polish pushes the machinery of cases further than Russian (seven, including the vocative), and it lines up consonant clusters that delight tongue-twisters — szcz, brzm, trzc. It serves as a second point in the Slavic family: without it, Russian would look like the norm, when it is only one option among others.
Luxembourgish
A national language in a country administered in three
In Luxembourg people speak Luxembourgish, write in French and read the papers in German — the division is not geographical but functional, and it shifts with the situation. The country is a laboratory of what daily trilingualism does. Its motto, taken from a song of 1859, says exactly what is at stake: “Mir wëlle bleiwe wat mir sinn” — we want to remain what we are.
Autres systèmes de signes
Ce qui signifie sans être une langue
Chacun de ces systèmes a exactement une chose que les langues ont, et une chose qui leur manque. C'est ce partage qui permet de dire, à la fin, ce qu'est une langue.
A whistled language
When a language changes medium to cross a valley
The silbo of La Gomera, the whistling of Kuşköy in Turkey: these are not separate languages but existing ones transposed into whistling — you keep the melody and the rhythm, you lose the timbre, and it carries for kilometres. A precious limit case: it separates a language cleanly from its channel, something writing never quite does.
Drawing
Showing instead of naming
A drawing is not translated: it is looked at. It has no tense, no negation, no conditional — try drawing “he would not have come”. What it loses in grammar it gains in simultaneity: everything is there at once. This is exactly the argument of the sign language chapter, moved onto ground where nobody feels threatened.
Music
A notation that records everything except meaning
Musical notation is a complete writing system: pitch, duration, intensity, timbre. Only one thing is missing — signification. A score prescribes an action, it asserts nothing; you cannot contradict it. It serves as the counter-test of the book: this is what a writing system that says nothing looks like.
The signs of the trading floor
Open outcry: a full lexicon invented for noise
Before screens, traders spoke to each other by hand in total din: palm turned inwards to buy, outwards to sell, fingers near the face for price and away from it for quantity. A language born of a material constraint, learned on the job, passed on without a manual — and dead within twenty years, when computers removed the noise.
Mathematics
The only language in which a sentence can be proved
A surprisingly recent notation: the equals sign dates from 1557, the symbols of logic from the nineteenth century. Before that, mathematics was done in sentences. Mathematical language was built to remove ambiguity — that is, to forbid exactly what literature lives on. Two opposite projects, one material.
Computing
A language whose addressee has no intentions
A programming language is the only case where saying is doing, with no witness and no consent: the machine executes, it does not interpret. Hence a constraint found nowhere else — ambiguity there is not a stylistic flaw, it is a breakdown. And a question for the book: what machine translation is doing today to the ten languages of the previous chapters.