The book Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes is about a linguist who goes into the Amazon to learn the language of a tribe there (with the intention of translating the Bible and converting them to Christianity, although it doesn’t work out that way).
He describes the painstaking process of learning a language with no prior knowledge, and how difficult and frustrating it can be. But essentially you find the most patient speaker of the language and you point at stuff, then repeat back what they say, then try variations.
The hardest part is that languages don’t map onto each other perfectly. If you point at a stick and they say “fromp”, you don’t know if that means “knobby elm twig”, “stick”, “tree part”, “small thing on ground”, “wood”, “junk I don’t care about”, or if they thought you were pointing at one of the bugs on it. So it takes a lot of experimentation and repetition.
I gather that it is possible for two people who speak different languages, and neither of whom knows any of the other’s language – to converse with each other about quite complicated matters, using their respective languages, and to understand each other remarkably well. I suspect that this is relatively rare, but it does happen. The two participants need, I think, to be well-disposed to each other, and genuinely interested in understanding what the other has to say – and maybe of a certain temperament. I don’t think this is something that I could ever achieve, no matter how high my regard for the other person.
I remember being told by a Czech guy – a very nice, genial fellow, definitely fond of his fellow-man – of his going to Hungary to watch a football match, and meeting there a Hungarian guy, and the two of them having a lengthy conversation in their respective languages, and understanding each other just fine – although neither knew more than a couple of words of the other’s tongue. Also a nice tale from India in Raj times, of a Scottish soldier, and a Gurkha, conversing with each other in their respective languages, in a warm and friendly fashion, and understanding each other very well. This irrespective of the fact that neither had the slightest knowledge of the other’s language.
I can’t imagine two adults doing this. Sure, nice smiles and hand gestures go a long way if you just want to offer somebody a beer at a football game…but holding a serious dialogue? How would that work?
I’ve watched the video – who can know how much or how little, the babies were actually communicating with each other?
I really don’t know how it would work between adults – there’s no way I could do it myself, I’m just plain not that interested in other people. Having heard of it though, more than once – it would seem (however it works, rational-science-wise or in some other realm) that it can sometimes happen, given a sufficient degree of goodwill and interest toward the other, on both sides.
