Comments by Indira Nair at the Initiation Ceremony of Phi Sigma Iota, Language Honor Society, March 2002

It is an honor to be standing here speaking to you on this very special day that celebrates your achievements in taking as your own a language which for most of you is one other than you were brought up with. That is a great achievement indeed!

My heartfelt congratulations! My deepest admiration comes to you at this achievement. Your teachers and advisors have selected you as stars among your peers -- to honor you with membership in Phi Sigma Iota; to honor you for a special understanding of a language and culture; for finding the time, enthusiasm and energy for that special understanding.

You are probably wiser than I can ever be. Yet, I am placed here by age -- and I asked myself what I can say that would be meaningful. I thought I would ask you to reflect with me on the value and the values of this path of study you have chosen.

In the United States, we are just beginning to realize the importance of learning a language other than English. The reason that someone wants to employ you because you know a "foreign language" is utilitarian -- you can deal better with a foreign culture, do business in another country, and so on. But the reason you chose to learn a language is, I am sure, a love for the languages, its resonances, beauty, capacity to make real how someone else in the world thinks, feels and lives. This is a wonderful thing.

Language is perhaps the most powerful thing we humans do. I say we “do” language because language is a dynamic, vibrant activity rather than a string of inanimate words that come out of our mouths. When you are really familiar with a language, you can paint visions without a brush, you can embrace without touching, and if you so choose, you can wound without a weapon. Language is a responsibility. Language encodes a culture.

The same words in the same language may mean different things in different ethnic cultures. One of the first surprises I got when faced with U.S. English despite my familiarity with British English is the use of the phrase "would you like to…", the phrase , "I don't care" and the words "up and down". My second week in the U.S. we graduate students who were physics teaching assistants were being given our assignments for setting up undergraduate lab experiments. Mr. Green, our supervisor, took the simplest experiment which involved practically no work to set up and looked at me. He asked, "Mrs. Nair, would you like to set up this experiment?" I thought to myself that I could volunteer for something harder instead of taking the easy way out. So I said, " No, Sir" ( that is the other thing, in India we called all our teachers "Sir" or "madam"). He paused a second, taken aback I thought by my answer; the other students looked at me strangely… and he assigned that experiment to someone else . It was a couple of months later that I realized that "would you like to do this" didn't mean would you LIKE to do this or not…it was just a polite way of saying "you do this"!! Then I understood the awkward silence that followed when I said, "No, Sir" to Mr. Green.

The first few months it hurt me too when I would ask my research advisor which way I should do something and he would say, :"I don't care..." I never saw so much absence of caring! -- till I realized his "don't care" translated to my "don't mind" . It began then to dawn on me why during our first week, the man who gave us TAs the English test said, " I don't care if you speak the Queen's English, I want you to speak and understand English as it is spoken in Kansas!". There are some words the I used that my Indian friends who had been her for a while told me meant something else-- and I quickly gave up using those words … of course, I won't tell you what they were… Now thirty-five years later, I don't even remember most of them.

Another surprise I had is when I started teaching. Students would use this book called the synonym finder. I found that strange because we had been taught that no two words mean the same or they wouldn't be two words. Over the years, I have really come to appreciate that as I hear people use a word that slightly misses the full meaning of the original. One of the things I do in whatever subject I teach, that my students first hate and then come to appreciate in time, is to have them inquire where each term we encounter came from. They then discover the story of not just the words but of the times and places and social conditions through which the word evolved.

The richness and variability of language always amaze me. The evolution of meaning of words with culture even in decades is interesting to watch, words like pot, grass, neat, hot and cool changed meanings in my lifetime here in the U.S.

Language is a basic human instinct. The faculty of language is part of the overall architecture of the mind and brain, rather than merely coming from one or several senses. The faculty of language is this architecture of the mind and brain, interacting with other components, the sensorimotor apparatus and the systems that enter into thought, imagination, emotions and other mental processes and their expression and interpretation. It is the coming together of different parts of the brain and body in phenomenally wonderful ways.

Recently, I experienced this in a deep way when due to a physiological problem -- the absence of one hormone, estrogen in my brain, or because of the inability to process the hormone efficiently, I went through a rather frightening period when I knew the sense of a word I wanted to say but couldn't remember the word. This was the strangest sensation, and connected to a general loss of memory. I am okay now, but this experience left me with a gratitude for this grea t human capacity that is the synthesis of so many capabilities acting in concert to bring out something we take for granted -- our capacity to think in language, articulate our thoughts, our gift to speak silently or using signs, or more often, using pressure waves in air called sound! My experience made me appreciate all the more how complexly constructed our capacity for language is, and what a wonderful gift.

In their book, " The Wonder of Being Human", scientists John Eccles and Daniel Robinson describe the progress of language acquisition in children. "The earliest stages of functional development of language," they write, " is pragmatic, and the child uses language in his/her own way to regulate those around, to acquire desirables, and to invite interactions. These functions then develop into the more mature mathetic function in which the child uses language to learn about the world -- its cognitive aspect. But of course, these two functions, the pragmatic and mathetic are inextricable mixed in the language the child used from moment to moment."

But the wonder of being human resides in the fact that in some fundamental sense there must be only one language. No one is designed to speak one or another language, nut we are all designed to speak nevertheless. Noam Chomsky inquiring where the capability for language resides and describing that reductionistic methods which look for one language center in the brain would not be able to describe this wonderful human potentiality, writes that the "ability to acquire language is a fixed uniform species property". A Japanese child brought up here in the U.S. hearing mostly English speaks English whereas in Japan, he or she would have picked up Japanese first. While this seems obvious at first, when you think deeply on this, this is a wonder, not just the learning of the words, but of the language with its subtleties and connotations.

When I lived in Bombay, India, three of the families, mine and two others, had little children of ages 2 and 3. Each family spoke a different language. One of these languages was not even derived from the same mother language as the others. I noticed something wonderful about children and language then. When the three children (let's call them A. B, and C) played together, A would address B in B's language, and B would respond in A's. When they all spoke at the same time, it was anyone's bet which language each would speak!

This behavior captures for me the essence of why I feel happy to see so many of you begin to study a new language. There was an embedded caring and empathy in the children's behavior -- the children recognized intuitively the power of language to reach out, to bridge to truly communicate. This is the power you have chosen for yourself. You chose to study the language not merely for pragmatic reasons of survival, but the mathetic reason of understanding. For as you learn a new language, you begin to appreciate the culture whence it came and the configurations of space and tie that molded it. It makes you use your own language with more care and appreciation. It helps you see commonalities in the human condition. Did you pause to think -- that, if we humans didn't have so much in common, you could simply not learn another language? For example, love, trust, respect and friendship are all common, culturally values notions learning the words and their nuances in another language opens your eyes to the nuances of that culture in an intricate way. Learning the language teaches you the concepts and relationship and ways of according dignity in that culture.

This brings me to the last point I wanted to make. This is that learning another language gives you a Distance Vision with respect to your own language. What do I mean by Distance Vision? It is an idea that came to me because of an experience I had in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. It is something that has begun to shape my philosophy of teaching. My sister was visiting from India and was with me at the Museum. There were three small seascapes by Monet on the wall of a small room. I had looked at them close, admired them -- I love the Impressionists -- and moved on. A few minutes later, I put my head into that room to look for my sister. This time, looking from far away, I reeled -- the genius of Monet really hit me. From this distance, I saw the scene as the artist had wanted me to see. This blew my mind, the idea that the artist standing within arm's length of his canvas, drew what was best seen from a distance --- that was Monet's genius. I have come to call this Distance Vision. I have come to believe that part of growing mature in teaching is an ability to try to develop this talent in the student, and to give them your Distance Vision.

As I was preparing this talk, it occurred to me that a Distance Vision about your own culture is one talent you can develop as you learn ore and more about another language and culture. That is a great insight to have.

The sociologist Manfred Stanley has said that there are two objectives towards which most human endeavors are directed -- species survival and human dignity. He is concerned that in technology, and in the most prevalent modes of economic and political thinking, we are most often caught up with species survival. You have truly chosen the path that values human dignity by seeking to understand another -- the path that lets you take steps, (in the words that Professor Hayes read in the induction ceremony), towards "discerning, sympathetic understanding" and peace in the world.

Congratulations and my very best wishes as you continue your journey of understanding!