The film was “Translating,” by the Israeli filmmaker Nurith Aviv, a series of in-depth monologues by translators from Hebrew into other languages, and the occasion the annual conference of the Israel Translators Association in Jerusalem. The audience, whose linguistic gaps were filled by Hebrew subtitles, could identify with the speakers’ singular strain of obsession, their solitude, and their implicit surprise at being for once in the spotlight instead of the shadows wherein they normally lurk. The symphony of the dozen or so languages in which these unsung laborers told their stories, all referring to the one language they shared and revered, was mesmerizing.

In Barcelona, Manuel Forcano, a lapsed Catholic, told in Catalan how translating poet Yehuda Amichai, a once-orthodox Jew, helped him come to terms with his faithlessness. The Lithuanian-born Sivan Beskin, in Tel Aviv, recalled in Russian how she began translating children’s stories by Lithuanian-born Israeli poet Leah Goldberg from Hebrew back into the poet’s native Russian, so that her immigrant parents could read those stories to her children. Near Paris, Itshok Niborski spoke in a Spanish-accented Yiddish of compiling a Hebrew-Yiddish dictionary of idioms.

At minute 1:03:00 of the film appeared the Israeli author Ala Hlehel, of Acre, introduced himself and explained that his native tongue, which he was speaking, was colloquial Arabic. He learned literary Arabic in school, and then Hebrew, which was “not a neutral language for me, it was charged.” He had only just begun to elaborate – “it is the language of occupation, but also of culture” – when the system crashed, those last words frozen on the screen, and a technician rushed over.

Hlehel must not have been on screen for more than 30 seconds when the film stopped, and one had barely begun to take in this new character and absorb his words. But no sooner had the audience realized there was a problem, when a young female voice in my row said out loud: “I’m glad it got stuck. I don’t like what he’s saying.” Then she added: “I don’t like his terminology. It’s not like he’s from the occupied territories, he’s from Israel.”

Trying to understand what there was not to like – the speaker had barely opened his mouth, what “terminology”? – I looked back at the screen, and there it was, the “O” word, hanging in the air, stuck right in front of our faces, with nothing to do about it and nowhere to go. I felt stung by my colleague’s rudeness. Whereas my engrossment in the film had transported me to that perfect place where we all listen to each other with full attention and respect, the women’s outburst reminded me I was still in Israel. The mixture of sheer discourtesy, intolerance and even incuriosity made me cringe.

How dare she hope Hlehel shut up before he even had the chance to say anything? I, for one, was extremely eager to hear what Hlehel had to say. I had first heard of the 38-year-old author two years ago, when he won a literary award in Beirut but was forbidden by Israel to travel to the ceremony – an administrative injunction he challenged in the Supreme Court and succeeded to overturn. Then, some months ago, a Facebook friend had shared a witty column Hlehel had written about the Arabs “wanting back” all the words Hebrew had “stolen” from them, often mispronouncing and distorting their meanings in the process.

Now here he was, about to share some of his thoughts on the profession that had brought us here today, our shared self-appointed mission of ferrying our insular cultural treasures safely into the bigger world. And after hearing how this was being done by an assortment of people who ranged from strangers to friends, we were now about to hear it from a more challenging perspective, that of our estranged cousins, our intimate nemeses, the Arab minority of Israel. For me it was a peak moment in the film. Yet, my colleague over there in the darkness had already heard enough.

While I waited for the organizers to fix the problem, I fumed. I felt the speaker was in the middle of a very personal confession about who he was and how he had become that person, and this heckler was denying him nothing less than his right of self-determination. I tried to analyze what he had said: Hlehel had referred to Hebrew as “the language of the occupation” and the disembodied voice had said that was not acceptable coming from him as he was not occupied. It took me a moment to locate the problem, but when I did, I was actually impressed at how instantly my colleague had processed the whole situation: in her reasoning, I realized, Hlehel was declaring that his native Galilee, part of Israel since it was founded in 1948, was occupied, which meant he did not recognize Israel, and therefore she, an Israeli, did not recognize him. The linguist in me kicked in: but that’s not what he said, I thought. He said Hebrew was the language of occupation, but didn’t specifically count himself as one of the people under it. He may or may not consider himself occupied but still call it the language of occupation. But even if he was implying he did not recognize Israel, do we Israelis have to be so terrified that we would rather end the conversation right there? I would like to think we have enough confidence to hear dissenting voices, not just ones that make us feel good, and contend with them.

Unfortunately, in today’s Israel, any voice that falls outside of the political mainstream is silenced with outrageous ease. How naïve of me to be surprised that happened here, at an international translators’ conference. It must have also been naïve of me to think anyone with a complicated enough identity to qualify for this line of work was as curious as I was about other people’s complicated identities. Here was one of our esteemed colleagues laying himself bare, exposing the clashes of his battling loyalties, ultimately leading to his amazing choice to dedicate much of his human capital to bringing his people the culture of their adversaries. It was surely the most painful of all the stories we had heard. But apparently it left some people cold.

Thankfully, our competent technician got the film running again and we got to hear Hlehel’s account of pillaging Israeli literature and making it available to the Palestinian people, perhaps getting even with us for all those stolen words. He overcame his initial resistance when he discovered the iconoclastic Hebrew playwright Hanoch Levin and couldn’t resist translating his work, beginning with “The Suitcase Packers,” about a group of people who all want to leave the country, but, instead, die.

The camera panned Acre’s jumble of cinderblock tenements with solar water heaters on their rooftops, with a glimpse of a strip of blue sea on the horizon, as seen from the window of the translator’s study. The translator reverted to his shadows and his silence.

0

Noam Sheizaf at +972 Magazine brought to my attention a Jerusalem Post editoral which made a few red lights in my head go off (bolding mine):

ISRAEL IS the only country in the world where Jews are the majority. Only here can they enjoy the advantages of living in a state whose language, holidays and national symbols are their own.

Let’s leave aside the truly objectionable stuff in this editorial and focus on the linguistic part. I love Hebrew, in fact, it’s my favorite of Israel’s national symbols. I would like to point out how ludicrous it is for the Post to claim Jewish “ownership” over this, or any, language.

I

Before anything else, reflect for a moment on the fact that the majority of Jews worldwide do not speak Modern Israeli Hebrew and would probably call another language (usually American English) their own.

II

The nation is a relatively new construct, dating back just to the end of the 18th century. Naming official national languages was part of the rise of nationalism in Europe. It was part of the creation of a national identity — not artificial, but put together of existing pieces.

To the linguistically uninitiated, it might seem natural that every nation-state has a language “of their own”. German for the Germans, Swedish for the Swedes, Chinese for the Chinese. But languages are actually really bad at sticking to international borders. The Swiss speak Swiss German, which is no more similar to Germany’s Standard German than is Dutch. Standard Swedish is so similar to Norwegian and Danish that the three might be considered dialects of one language, and can be understood mutually with a bit of effort. “Chinese” is not even one language; usually “Chinese” means Standard Mandarin, the official language used by the People’s Republic, but the term includes the many many languages spoken in mainland China, even though many of them only have a writing system in common, remaining unintelligible to one another.

In the case of Modern Israeli Hebrew it should be especially clear that there is not a 1:1 relationship between (Jewish) nation and (Hebrew) language. Modern Hebrew has taken on European structure in almost all areas of grammar (with some very notable exceptions), since those who revitalized it were speakers of European languages. The bulk of Israeli slang is comprised of Arabic loanwords such as ahla and sababa. And the language is spoken by non-Jews as well; the Arabic of Israeli Arabs is so full of Hebrew that efforts are underway to refresh the community’s Arabic vocabulary.

III

Nonetheless, Modern Hebrew is the result of a conscious effort of will, and one might insist that it is an exceptionally national language. After all, the Zionist made a real, and apparently successful, effort to revive the language of Jewish scripture.

But in fact, even those parts of Modern Hebrew considered “pure Hebrew” — the parts attested in the Bible and other ancient texts — are unlikely to be in any way pure or belong entirely to any ethnic group. Quite simply, no language ever does. The ancient Israelites did not live in isolation, and were surrounded by different peoples with different cultures and different languages. Inevitably, the language they spoke was affected by it, and likely eagerly assimilated elements of the gentiles’ languages, just as all languages have always done everywhere. (but see NOTE below)

IV

The suggestion that the Arabs have no place within our state, that they are a foreign entity that does not belong, is ludicrous and incredibly offensive. It is even ludicrous if you think there’s a god-given right for Jews to be in what was once Cana’an. Modern Israel (and its language) have always had non-Jewish residents (and speakers), most of them Arabs. At no point was the pre-state Yishuv isolated from Arabic culture. Israel has co-existed with Arabs, sometimes more peacefully than at other times, from the very start. Perhaps oddly, I find myself startled to see Israelis railing against Arabic culture as though it were a scary foreign influence. To me, hummus is the national dish, and even those who mistakenly think it’s falafel can’t deny there’s a bit of Arab in us.

Incidentally, sababa shel hummus, roughly “nice hummus”, is a phrase with an [arguably] European structure (cf. English “quite a day” and “hell of a guy” ), made up of two Arabic-loaned content words connected by one Hebrew function word [shel, “of”]. And what phrase could possibly be more Israeli?

I feel there is a general point here about Jewish culture – before, during, and after Diaspora. Before Diaspora, the Israelites were a part of the fabric of the Ancient Near East, going about the typical Ancient Near East national pass-times of worshiping, building, farming and conquering, maintaining a distinct culture and very distinct religion but not without influence from the languages, cultures and religions of their neighbors (who were all influenced in return, and by one another as well). In Diaspora, the Jews of every area developed their own cultural and linguistic remix. The most well-known resulting languages are Yiddish and Ladino, but they are not nearly the only ones. I recently learned that a small Jewish community in northwestern India developed a dialect of Marathi: Judæo-Marathi, still spoken in India and Israel.

And indeed, after Diaspora, the state of Israel has been a cultural patchwork quilt, taking patterns and colors from the many places its residents came from, while remaining firmly grounded in the political and cultural reality of the Middle East, which we are now undoubtedly part of.

V

One could argue, and perhaps one should, that in all of these cases the borrowing group made the borrowings its own, both by choosing them and by integrating them in a unique way (i.e. fitting loanwords to native phonology and morphology, which Modern Hebrew excels at). But there is nothing particularly Jewish about living in cultural isolation, nor is it a particularly sensible proposition that Modern Hebrew belongs exclusively to Israeli Jews. The Israeli Arabs and Palestinians have been there since before Hebrew was revitalized, Hebrew has been in contact with them ever since, and whether the Jerusalem Post likes it or not, the Arabic language and Palestinian culture are part of the fabric of the Israeli quilt.

Note

Unfortunately I am unfamiliar with Ancient Hebrew and neighboring languages of the same period, such as Philistine, Phoenician, Moabite, Hittite, and Ancient Egyptian, and can’t give examples for loanwords off the top of my head like I can with English and Modern Hebrew. I also don’t know any good source to check (though I’d be eager to get one). But I’ve certainly seen mention on Wikipedia and on Israeli linguistics blogs of loanwords from neighboring languages into Ancient Hebrew, and this is not surprising in the slightest. It would be surprising if it were the other way around.

Related reading tip

Jerry Haber of the Magnes Zionist is writing a fascinating series of articles about “Israel’s ‘Arab Problem'”. Part one, part two. I read them cross-posted on +972 Magazine, which is becoming a more and more central source for my reading…

by Shoshana London Sappir

A few years ago my husband and I attended a lecture by linguist Ghil’ad Zuckermann, presenting a provocative theory: the Hebrew we speak today is closer to the European languages of the early Zionists than it is to classical Hebrew, even though most of its vocabulary is Hebrew; therefore, Zuckermann proposed, it would be more accurate to call it “Israeli” than “Hebrew,” letting go of the romantic notion that Israelis today speak the language of the Bible. Our conversation about this idea went on for days after we came home, sweeping up the whole family; later, Michael even wrote a term paper about it.

So it was only natural that when I saw the translators’ association to which I belong had scheduled another lecture about the genealogy of Modern Hebrew, I asked if anybody would like to go with me. Perry said he would and we both looked forward to a pleasant evening in Tel Aviv. I dutifully registered in advance. Next to Perry’s name I added: “14 years old.”

On the hour-plus drive we discussed the upcoming lecture. The speaker was a researcher who was studying the structures of spoken Hebrew and was going to present us with her findings as to whether they had more in common with European languages or with Hebrew, and whether, indeed, this language was Hebrew. Perry was already inclined to believe it was not, because he cannot understand the Bible without an intense explanation or translation: he welcomed the new translation of the Bible into Modern Hebrew and has begun reading it.

At the registration desk a colleague of mine searched for my name on the list, crossed it out and started writing me an invoice. I noticed the total she had entered, and started to protest, “what about him?” – but thought the better of it mid-sentence and shut my mouth; if minors got free admission, who was I to argue?

During the lecture we tried not to disturb anyone with our excited whispering and exchanges of meaningful looks of agreement, surprise or exasperation over certain points in the presentation or behaviors by members of the audience: one woman stormed out not ten minutes into the lecture, shouting at the speaker: “Shame on you!” for doubting the unbroken chain between ancient and modern Hebrew. Another translator prefaced a question about the effectiveness of correcting linguistic “mistakes,” by saying: “If my 15-year-old son had his way, he would spend his whole life lazing in front of the computer and television,” which elicited a room full of nods and sighs of agreement. Perry and I rolled our eyes at each other and clenched our teeth, as if to say: “Just look how people talk about children.”

On our way out of the room for the break, one of my friends turned to Perry, and asked in a kind but patronizing tone: “So, did you fall asleep?” More awake than ever, Perry replied with a startled: “Huh?”

Suddenly I started seeing a pattern: my friend was assuming Perry wasn’t there of his own will but was forced to suffer in boredom while he waited for his mother. As if a child couldn’t possibly come to a lecture out of interest, just like we did. Could that be why they hadn’t charged him admission? Just by looking at him and noting he is of school age, did everyone take it for granted I made him come because I didn’t have a babysitter? Did the organizers let him in for free as a favor to me, allowing me to use an extra seat because they thought I had nowhere else to park  him?

It reminded me of the story about the guy who comes to a movie theater box office carrying a crocodile under his arm, and says: “Two, please.” The teller says: “Sir, don’t you think you should take that crocodile to the zoo?” “Thanks,” he answers, “but we already went this morning.”

Sitting down in the lounge with our refreshments, we analyzed the evening. We agreed that people were so upset by their preconceptions’ being challenged that they hardly let the lecturer speak, interrupting her with questions and comments from the beginning.

The next day I sent an e-mail to a colleague whom I had seen at the lecture, with some information she had asked for. On a personal note, I added: “My son really enjoyed the lecture and would like to come to future events.” To which she replied: “That is SO funny! What an adorable geek!” I answered: “What is funny is that everybody thinks he came with me because I didn’t have a babysitter. He really came because he was interested.” She replied, by way of apology: “My son’s a geek too.”

But Perry does not consider himself a “geek,” nor is he considered one by others. The idea, I gathered, is that it is unusual, and what’s more, uncool, for a teenager to pursue intellectual interests, especially at an “adult level.” The geek label implies that such a child is probably uninterested in sports, music and girls, socially awkward and unpopular, living the lonely life of the misunderstood, his best friend being his computer.

Perry knows what a geek is; he just played one in a teen musical about geeks and jocks, the American high school stereotypes. But such categories have never meant much to him. From the first grade Perry has been attending Sudbury Jerusalem, where students are not divided by age and mix freely with each other and with the staff. They are free to pursue whatever interests they have at a given time with whatever means available: play, books, the Internet, but primarily conversation with other children or adults.
Maybe it is because of this upbringing that Perry has never internalized a hierarchy of subjects of interest and activities, rating them as childish/adult, work/play, serious/frivolous, cool/geeky. He has always flowed with his interests, at times devoting intense attention to one thing and then moving on to another. In the early years of school he was very interested in climbing on door frames and walls and leaping from high perches; we nicknamed him Spiderman. He went through an Ancient Egypt period and still likes to go to the museum and decipher hieroglyphics. He spends a lot of time playing the piano. He has a rock band with some school friends. In the last couple of years he has become politically aware and sometimes comes to demonstrations with me.

Perry is still a child and we treat him like one: we support and protect him, attempt to know where he is at all times and keep him safe. But the status of child should not be a barrier that keeps him out of the adult world insofar as the environment in question poses no danger to him. He is just as mentally capable as any adult of hearing a lecture about the Hebrew language, and a lot more open-minded than some language professionals.

Sometimes we are startled to be reminded we live in a world where adults have such a skewed view of children: if they spend a lot of time on their computers, like us, they are presumably brain-dead. If they show signs of interest in their culture, they are freaks. I suppose the ideal, non-threatening child, in this view, would be penned up in his classroom with other members of his ilk, dutifully performing age-approved tasks dictated by adults – but not too enthusiastically.

Language is all around us. It is everywhere, everyone uses it, and people are interested in languages wherever you go — people like languages. I get into spontaneous conversations about language with non-linguists several times a week. But when I tell people that I study linguistics, and moreover, that I’m into grammar theory, many are nearly shocked. “Grammar theory?! Why? Grammar is so boring!”. This post is an attempt to explain why, of all things, I love grammar.

First I will say a little about the traditional, or naive, view of grammar. The way I used to think of grammar, the way most people are probably used to thinking of grammar, is that grammar is something like religious dogma. There are do’s and don’ts, and their goal is to make your language usage correct and beautiful. It is commonly held that there is a right way to speak English (or German, or Hebrew, or Dutch, or Russian, etc.) and that there is a wrong way. Many are even convinced that without instruction in the correct rules of the grammar for their native language, speakers will talk and write the wrong way.

Another commonly held strange belief that confuses the matter is that every word has a certain meaning. So traditional grammars label, for example, the verb form write as “present tense”, and another form of that verb, wrote, gets the label “past tense.” Each correctly describes a typical way to use the form, but that description can’t explain all usage in any clear way. The naive language afficionado may then, as is Bill Bryson in his Mother Tongue (which I just read), be shocked to find that the innocent present-tense write is being used in such a patently past-tense sentence as “I used to write on my blog” (to use my own example). But grammar is a little bit more complicated than that.

Symbols, a system of symbols.

The way we look at language and grammar changed forever in the later part of the 19th century, when Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist (who incidentally got his PhD at the University of Leipzig, where I study), came upon an important realization. He realized that any symbol is made up of meaning on the one hand, and of form on the other hand; he realized that the connection between the two is purely arbitrary; he realized that language is a system of such arbitrary symbols.

This means that it is an arbitrary choice of English speakers to say “I used to write” and of Hebrew speakers to say ‘nahagti likhtov’, which means the same. It means we assign different sounds to express this thought simply because we are speaking different languages – there is no logical reason to say “to write” rather than Hebrew ‘likhtov’ or Spanish “escribir” or Russian ‘pisat’’. This is a little bit obvious on the one hand, especially if you speak more than one language. But it is startling, because we are used to thinking that words simply mean something. In truth, there is no connection between “tree” and the physical object that we refer to with the word; the word is just a short burst of sounds that we agree to use to communicate about our bark-covered, leafy friends.

These insights had impact in many fields of philosophy and social science in the decades that followed. A particularly big step was taken in the mid-1950’s by a young American linguist named Noam Chomsky. Chomsky argued – and still argues –

• that language is a system,
• that it is a system unique to human beings (other animals can’t produce language of the kind humans use, even with help),
• that it is a system universal to all human beings (even the most isolated human cultures use language),
• and that this system is an inborn feature of the human brain.

Chomsky has argued much more than just this, and has identified recursion as the key feature of human language that makes it so useful and fundamentally separates it from other animals’ communication – but I will spare you the details. The logic is solid, trust me. There has been an ongoing debate about some of the points above ever since Chomsky first began to publish, but I will spare you those details as well for now.

Generativist grammar theory.

Modern grammar theory is a direct result of Chomsky’s Generativistic approach, an approach which Chomsky has developed over the past half-century, publishing a new version of his theory every decade or so. Chomsky’s works have transformed all of linguistic theory, even amongst those who disagree with his hypotheses or his approach.

Chomsky and other generativists have demonstrated that every native speaker of a language has an internal grammar that allows them to instinctively know what is a possible sentence in their language and what is not, and to only speak or write in a way that fits this grammar. This means that a native speaker cannot use their language in a wrong way. To demonstrate, here is a grammatical English sentence:

(1) “I used to write on my blog, but now I rarely do”.

This is not a grammatical sentence of English:

(2) “I wroted on-blog-a-mine, now-but I not-much does“,

nor is this:

(3) “I on my blog to write used, but now do I rarely“,

and of course not this:

(4) “Kcha plip plip blugu, muppu muppu fla gen“.

There are, of course, different ways in English to express the thought behind sentence (1), such as this:

(5) “I don’t write on my blog as much as I used to”.

But for some reason, (2), (3) and (4) are not utterances that an English speaker would produce in place of (1) or (5). These example sentences would look very different in another language, but there would always be sentences that are part of the language and possible sentences that are not. Generative grammar theory tries to figure out how this works, how native speakers structure language.

Intention, meaning, form.

Another important realization that Chomsky has given us is that a grammatical form is not necessarily a meaningful form; not every grammatical sentence makes sense. Chomsky’s classic example is (6) “colorless green dreams sleep furiously.” There is no way to rule out the form of sentence (6), but there is also no reasonable way to interpret its meaning, except perhaps in the context of a highly surreal post-modern poem. A form can be permitted by the grammar without carrying coherent meaning; form and meaning are very separate things – continuing de Saussure’s line of thought.

One of the secret joys of linguistics is getting to spend time on this kind of absurd sentence, but it also illustrates a fascinating and important point: every speaker of a language has a formal grammar for that language – a system for producing grammatical utterances, forms that are permissible in the language – and this component is responsible for form alone. There is then another component of grammar that is in charge of making sense of things, which is different in every language as well.

For example, some say we must never use a double negative in English. Others say there ain’t nothing wrong with double negatives. In Russian, everyone agrees that they are mandatory – the sentence “I didn’t see anybody” is, if my Russian is to be trusted, ‘nikavo ne videl’, literally ‘[I] didn’t see nobody’. In fact, Russian has not only double but even triple negatives – the question ‘kto kavo videl?’, “who saw whom?”, can be answered ‘nikto ne videl nikavo‘, literally “nobody didn’t see nobody”, meaning “nobody saw anybody”. In standard varieties of English the Russian pattern would have no meaning. Some would say Russian is just illogical, or perhaps that English is, but really they just have a different way of presenting the same meaning. In Russian you just negate everything in the sentence, whereas standard English uses one negative element (“nobody”) and then only uses “any“-items, which aren’t actually negative, but are mandatorily used together with negatives. These are simply different ways to give form to a particular meaning.

Coming back to our little verb write, let’s see how a grammar theorist would label these forms. write would be, for example, the bare verb form. In English this is usually used for the present tense (I write, you write, they write) but it is also used in the infinitive to write. There is a particular meaning of the verb use which lets us make a particular kind of past tense, which I would call past habituative: “I used to write”. It is created by taking the preterite (“simple past”) of use – used – and putting it together with an infinitive. Used to write, used to run, used to think – etc. A linguist would note that this is a perfectly normal way of using the bare form of an English verb.

It doesn’t make sense in a literal way – the sentence doesn’t mean I “used” anything – but it’s a form that English uses to express a certain meaning. The Modern Hebrew equivalent is created using the verb ‘linhog’, the most common meaning of which today is “to drive”, but which also means to “to be of the habit”. write is present-tense in some situations but not so much in other situations, just like use or ‘linhog’ have different uses. Forms cannot be so simply labeled by meaning; the link between form and function is not as simple as we may have liked it to be.

To complicate things, logicians and semanticists, who study the meaning of words and sentences, have also made the distinction between meaning and intention, both of which are involved in the semantic content of language. “You will give me back my book” and “give back my book!” have the same basic meaning, but they express a different intention, and get a different grammatical form. In spoken Modern Hebrew the only difference between the two would be the intonation — in both cases the sentence is ‘takhzir li et hasefer sheli’.

Strange languages. Remarkable things.

It is remarkable that form is sometimes so independent from meaning and intention, and that meaning and intention sometimes have such an effect on form. But what is truly fascinating to me is that the way these levels of meaning and form are related to each other is in each language systematic. The way form and meaning are constructed, and the way they are related, are systematic, and it seems they are all fundamentally based on the same principles. Even the differences between languages appear to be systematic, although the system is not clear yet. Still, without being entirely sure exactly what the “building blocks of grammar” are, we are able to easily compare between languages as different as English and Dyirbal. (The former is a very strange language originating on an island off the northwest of Europe but spoken by over 1½ billion people spread around the world. The latter is a very strange language of aboriginal Australia spoken by only a handful of people.)

Modern linguistics, or more particularly language typology, has managed to refine the way we look at languages and compare them, such that from just a few words describing the features of a language, a linguist can get an idea of how that language works without ever having heard a word of it. We can compare and summarize how languages deal with different things, such as marking tense on verbs or negating a proposition, even though they choose very different forms to express them.

Grammar theory is about figuring out how this works, what the underlying system is which gives rise to languages that are so different yet so similar. We are figuring out not only what differences there are, but also why and how they arise. We are working towards a theory of grammar that hopefully will one day be able to capture how any given language in the world separates the grammatical forms from the ungrammatical. On the way, we get to see how people say things in all kinds of different languages (there are over 6,000 languages spoken worldwide!), we get to argue and hypothesize, we get to play around with funny example sentences, and we get to write about it. I can’t imagine anything much better than that.