Stephen Fry Discusses New BBC Two Project

December 13, 2010 World Screen

PREMIUM: Stephen Fry talks in depth about the value of language, a subject of great personal interest to him as well as the focus of his new five-part series for the BBC, Planet Word.

 

WS: Tell us about your new project for BBC Two, Planet Word.
FRY: This is part of a larger, more grandiose scheme. It’s the first planet of a solar system that I want to make. If I wanted to put it with complete vanity, you might say that someone like David Attenborough has done on television something extraordinary that portrayed the natural world, but I thought it was interesting that no one has really tried to cover the human world in quite the same way. Not in an anthropological way, but things we make—the made world as opposed to the natural world. And I thought we’d start with language.
 
Planet Word is five programs about language. Not the English language specifically, but language itself. I started with where it came from, trying to find out why we speak it. Also, whether there are any theories as to exactly if it was language that made us the dominant and extraordinary species on the planet we are, or were we dominant and extraordinary and that’s what made us develop language. Is it a cart or a horse in that sense?
 
WS: Are you a fan of Steven Pinker?
FRY: Yes, enormous. We’re talking to him on the show. He’s been very important to it.
 
If you want to get into the methodology of linguistics, he is one side of a linguistic divide that has existed for nearly a hundred years. Essentially, he’s very much on the Chomskyan side of language, as an in-built competence, as opposed to the other ideas of it as an acculturated acquisition. He’s not extreme in that, but there are a growing number of linguists who have different views. We’re not going to get too bogged down in that sort of sectarian schism of linguistics, which is interesting if one likes the subject.
 
WS: Is the idea that thoughts need the framework of language in order to exist a new one?
FRY: No, I don’t think it is particularly new. It was most emphatically held as an orthodox in linguistics right up until the ’60s and ’70s; it’s known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, after two linguists, [Edward] Sapir and [Benjamin Lee] Whorf.
 
Worf is also the name of the Klingon in Star Trek, which is rather appropriate because Klingon has to do with one of the other things we’re looking at in the series, which is constructed language. Klingon is perhaps the most flourishing, after Esperanto, of all the languages that have been devised specifically.
 
If you take a designed city, one that hasn’t organically grown, it’s interesting to look at them to see if they work or not, and it’s similar with languages. With languages, we don’t know where they come from or how they are born or why that sound means that or how that verbal structure came to develop, et cetera. It’s interesting what happens when languages are consciously devised, as with Esperanto and, more recently, the Avatar language [Na’vi]. We’re talking to the guy who developed that Avatar language for James Cameron, [Paul Frommer], who is a senior linguist, a respected linguist. He found the opportunity to be paid money to devise a completely new language, an interesting one from an academic point of view as well.
 
There’s a lot of excitement about it. But, as you say, the idea that the word is the father of the thought, or is thought the father of the word, it’s a pretty instinctive question one might ask.
 
WS: I asked if it was new because I recently listened to a Radiolab episode and there was also a New York Times article, both on that theme.
FRY: The New York Times article was by a friend of mine, Guy Deutscher, who is on the other end of the linguistic church, as it were, from Steven Pinker. I respect him enormously. He wrote a wonderful book called The Unfolding of Language and, more recently, Through the Language Glass. He’s much more empirical than Pinker and he has the advantage that he is a speaker of an enormous number of languages. He’s actually a linguist in the old fashioned sense of the word, in that he can speak a lot of different languages.
 
It’s very easy to make these great statements as people used to. The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis exploded partly because of the claim by Whorf that the Hopi people couldn’t express certain thoughts—geography, geometric space, time—because their language constrained them. Then it turns out that he couldn’t speak a word of Hopi and he was just going by an old Hopi Indian who was stringing him along. It is just bad science, but people relish the idea of it. You might hear as a standard dinner party thing, that with the Germans, something about the German language makes them good at philosophy. It’s beguiling in the way irrational thought might be provoked and then tested empirically. This idea that you can have a primitive language—that these people’s language could never express such a complex abstract idea to do with thought or longing or memory or history or society—because our language has words for all of those things and if you live in a jungle and spend most of your time naked with a dart in your mouth you won’t have the tools with which to express such thoughts. Well, it may be that language hasn’t had to express them. But certainly every language can express these things.
 
Funny enough, good empirical proof of that is the bible, which is filled with quite a lot of abstract ideas. No book has been more translated around the world into more languages. There haven’t been problems translating it. It’s not always necessarily an exact translation, but nor is the English an exact translation of the Hebrew or Arabic [bibles].
 
WS: In terms of language representation, in Korea, King Sejong devised a simplified alphabet of 24 characters, called Hangul, for use by the common people.
FRY: Yes, to recognize the value of an alphabet. All of these things are deeply fascinating. As well as jokes, swearing, advertising, art, poetry, the language we use for all these things. And misunderstanding, where language goes wrong. There’s the pathology of language, the various peculiarities, from turrets to spoonerisms, stutters and stammers and things can all get in the way of linguistic expression.
 
WS: From your production company, Sprout Pictures, do you have any comedy in the pipeline?
FRY: Not particularly, funny enough. No. I’m happy doing QI for the BBC and for talkbackTHAMES. I have so many other things to do with my life outside of Sprout, as a writer and an actor.


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