Contra Wagner On State-of-Being Verbs

Here is Roy Wagner reviewing Michael Jackson’s 2016 book As Wide As The World Is Wise (emphasis mine):

Whether Jackson would agree or not, the presence or viability of philosophy in any human context has nothing to do with anything we might consider “philosophical”; it depends exclusively on the presence or absence of a state-of-being verb in the language of discourse. For all the premises, propositions, and arguments in philosophy (any philosophy, anywhere in the world) depend exclusively on what we could call the existential imperative: “to be or not to be, that is the question.” None of the Australian Aborigine languages (and none of the Papua New Guinea ones with which I am familiar) has a state-of-being verb, and so these languages cannot, by implication, straightforward logic, or any other means, make existence problematic. They have no existentialism. Their languages are what a linguist would call “pragmatic” or what Johannes Fabian would call “labor languages.” (Wagner 189)

Over the past few weeks, this short passage — this one sentence, really — has driven me slowly insane.

“They have no existentialism,” repeats the Imagined Roy Wagner who now lives rent-free in my skull. (Imagined Roy Wagner speaks in a sighing, ivy-league-softened accent. His is strangely philosophical.)

I parse and re-parse the brief review; as the kids say, ‘I notice I am confused.’

How could this be true? In what sense could any of this be true?

When I started down this road, I was a happy man. Now, I’m basically Pynchonic. I feel as if I’m Roger Mexico in Gravity’s Rainbow: a quiet statistician surrounded by byzantine bureaucracies of ever-expanding pseudo-scholarly lunacy. Like Mexico, my grasp on reality is maintained only through a hundred trivial comforts: chi-square fittings; nicotine; the tracking-down of lost textbooks. Am I insane, or is everyone else?

Initially, I thought that Roy Wagner’s assessment was obviously wrong in the way all ‘strong’ versions of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis are obviously wrong: false, but with long footnotes. Ultimately, I thought, the presence of an ‘existential imperative’ in language is surely both (a) universal, and (b) unimportant.

But now? Reader, no. It’s so much worse. And so much more complicated.

In what follows, I chart my descent into madness.

First —

Groundwork

Let’s lay some.

A Lot Of Strange Languages

There are at least 250 distinct languages in Australia, and close to 850 in Papua New Guinea. These are languages, not dialects; they’re not mutually intelligible. Today, many are critically endangered. Taken as a set, Roy Wagner’s claim generalises across roughly 15% of all known living human languages.

To a native English speaker, it’s hard to grasp the depth and diversity of delightful features that lurks within these ~250+850 languages. Even the famous cases are confusing.

In the language of the Warlpiri people of the Tanami Desert in (Northwestern) Central Australia, for example:

If an ‘avoidance register’ sounds weird, just wait. In the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, we see fully-fledged ritual avoidance languages used only when harvesting pandanus nuts. The Melpa language is common in the Western Highlands near Mount Hagen — a district beloved and made famous by anthropologists such as Marilyn Strathern. In 1991, Ethnologue estimated that Melpa had 130,000 speakers. It has a complex pseudo-binary counting system in which ‘two thumbs’ means ‘10’ and ‘man’ means ‘8’. (This fact is even more delightful when set against the diversity of counting systems in Papua New Guinea as a whole.)

In Guugu Yimithirr — the language from which we get the word ‘kangaroo’ — ‘absolute’ cardinality is king. You can’t say “to the left of” or “in front of”, because these are relative spatial descriptions. Instead, you say “west of”, “east of”, “north-east of”, etc. It’s like Bunny Colvin in The Wire designed a language. (Other languages have this too. It’s complicated.)

As with all things cultural, we should take such ‘unusual’ features as constructive proofs: it is possible to organise humans in such-and-such a way, because (we show) a stable & functional group of humans has in fact been organised in that way. One learns useful things through such a method. They’re not the hard limits of possibility, of course; for that we need a kind of anthropological exploratory engineering. But from each individual case, we learn ‘this is possible’. From their aggregation, we begin to grok the distribution of possible cultural adaptations to circumstance.

Copulae & Existential Verbs

Trivially, the thing that Wagner calls ‘to be’ in English — a “state of being verb”, an “existential imperative” — is not replicated in exactly the same grammatical structure in all languages in the world. It’s certainly not replicated in Australia and Papua New Guinea. However, this is for confusing (and non-obvious) reasons.

In ordinary English, ‘to be’ — that most irregular of verbs — is what linguists call a copula. It’s a word or phrase which links the subject of a clause to a subject complement. Some examples:

In each of these cases, ‘to be’ links a subject (such as the noun phrase ‘the soldiers’) to a predicative expression (such as the prepositional phrase ‘in the belly of the thing’). Sometimes we invert this order, as in the phrase “standing in the doorway were three angry policemen”. Other times, as in questions, we put the copula to the front: “are you confused?”

Some so-called ‘null-subject’ languages, such as Italian, omit the subject (but keep the copula) in at least some situations. Sono stanco means ‘I am tired’, but is literally ‘am tired’. Spanish does this, too. English rarely does.

Other languages are ‘zero copula’, omitting the copula in at least some grammatical contexts. Bengali is a good example of this. In Russian, a phrase like я человек is literally ‘I human’. Likewise, in Southern Quechua, payqa runam is ‘s/he (is) a human.’ English omits the copula, too, albeit in different contexts. In AAVE, it’s pretty common. The omission of the copula often feels like a defining trait of poetry and aphorism, too: “out of many, one”; “true, that”. (Usually, with examples, I’d say “the more, the better”, but here I’ll save you the catalogue.)

The thing that makes a phrase such as “to be or not to be” notable, then, is not the fact that ‘to be’ is ordinarily a copula verb in English. Rather, it’s that — when used in this context in English — ‘to be’ is not copular. In such usage, it is in fact an existential verb. It means, roughly, ‘to exist’.

Take the following phrases:

Whereas above we saw ‘to be’ used to join a subject to predicative expression, a different thing is happening in each of these cases. In a phrase such as “I only want to be,” the verb ‘to be’ is instead denoting ‘the thing that one does when one exists’. You could say “to exist or not to exist, that is the question” or “I think therefore I exist”. It doesn’t carry quite the same qualities, of course — if I were to say “these mean exactly the same thing”, many an English-speaking poet would squirm — but that’s roughly what ‘to be’ means here.

This turns out to be an Indo-European feature. Translate ‘I think therefore I am’, then, and you’ll notice that English isn’t special by any means:

Importantly, however, this isn’t a universal tendency, even amongst the languages common in modern Europe. In Spanish, one would instead prefer “Pienso, luego existo”, with the existir verb ‘to exist’ is used rather than the copula ser or estar ‘to be’. I think, therefore I exist.

Given that Wagner doesn’t claim that the Spanish language has “no existentialism”, a precisification seems obvious enough: he cares only about whether a given cultural/language group can talk about existence without specifying an object; whether they can denote existence, with a verb, in the abstract. If a language can say “to exist”, its users can have existentialism; if they cannot locate “existence” in their domain of discourse, no such philosophy emerges. The double-duty-as-a-copula confuses us, but it does not ultimately constrain.

So, then:

250 or 0?

It depends where you’re standing.

The Handbook of Australian Languages is a three-volume work edited by Robert Dixon and Barry Blake. It was published between 1979 and 1983. At over 1400 pages, it’s a sprawling and self-consciously incomplete compilation of some of the many things linguists knew about Australian Languages at the time. Hidden within it is a distinctive grammatical construction that Robert Dixon later commented on in Australian Languages: Their Nature and Development (2002):

It is often the case, in Australian languages, that verbs such as ‘sit’, ‘stand’ and ‘lie’ have an existential sense, but they are still being used as intransitive verbs, with a single core argument (in S function). However, in some languages just one of the stance verbs has a second function, as a copula verb. It then (a) lacks any reference to a particular stance; and (b) has two core arguments. In WL1, Arrernte, it is the verb nə- ‘sit’ which takes on a copula sense, as in (Wilkins 1989: 438):

(49) [arrpənhə] CS kənhə [tjəpə-tjəpə] CC nə-tjərtə
other(s) BUT lively be-REMOTE.PAST.HABITUAL but the other one used to be energetic

The stance verb which has taken on an additional copula sense is ‘sit’ in languages from groups E, M, WA, WF, WH, WJ, WL, NB and NC. It is ‘lie’ in languages from groups D, M, NB and NF, and ‘stand’ in languages from M and WD. We also find a copula sense accorded to the verb ‘go’ in languages from groups M, WH, NB and NH. Some other languages have a verbal form which just functions as a copula, but is cognate with a stance verb in another language. (242-3)

In his broader overview, John Newman writes,

The meaning of ‘sit’ often occurs in polysemy with ‘stay’ and ‘live’ meanings, e.g. Maori noho ‘sit, stay, live’. In Manthartha (Australian), a verb kumpa- occurs with the meanings ‘sit, camp, stay, live, be’ (Austin 1998). In Kiwai (Papuan), a ‘continuous performance’ aspectual suffix -diro, when added to omi ‘sit’ gives rise to ‘stay’ (Foley 1986: 147, 148). Although it is ‘sit’ which is commonly associated with extensions to ‘stay’ and ‘live’, ‘lie’ can also have this kind of extension. In Ngankikurungkurr (Australian), for example, the verb wibem/gibem ‘lie’ can imply sleeping or camping (Hoddinott and Kofod 1988: 131–2). (12)

In the Gumbaynggirr language, ŋayiŋgi was a commonly used verb meaning ‘live, stay, sit’, which also has a broader existential meaning. And in Yukulta, as Dixon & Blake’s Handbook catalogues, we see the intransitive verb wiṭitya meaning ‘to exist, lie, stay’ (Vol 3; 229, 287).

In other words: in a number of languages, including many from unrelated cultural groups across (what we now call) ‘Australia’, one says “X exists” by saying something like “X stands” or “X lies” or “X sits”. Sometimes ‘sitting’ literally denotes ‘the thing you do when you sit down’, but other times it’s denoting abstract existence.

How does this work? The same way all communication ‘works’. It’s different to English, but hardly alien. Context carries meaning; all communication entails situation.

(All humans do this! Language is default sloppy and imprecise!)

Australian languages aren’t unique in using ‘posture’ verbs in broader and non-literal senses, as Newman’s overview points out. (There’s a whole edited collection on the topic.) In Dutch, for example, we see auxiliary stance verbs in plenty of situations:

Dutch allows both ‘be’ and ‘stand/lie/sit’ constructions, but ‘be’ is far less idiomatic. Importantly, as Maarten Lemmens observes in that same collection, the semantics of these stance verbs often seems strange and “exotic” to non-Dutch speakers:

Plates are saliently horizontal in orientation yet in Dutch they are normally coded as standing rather than lying. Conversely, a building has a salient vertical extension, yet can in many contexts be said to be lying. Water is conceptualized as ‘sitting’ in the bottle, but as ‘lying’ on the floor or ‘standing’ in the cellar. […] The main focus is on locational expressions that situate an entity in physical space, but occasionally attention will be drawn to some metaphorical extensions as well, i.e. those usages that are no longer characterized relative to the spatial domain. (Lemmens 103-4)

Frankly, though, the complex ontology of posture/stance verbs in some Australian languages would put the Dutch to shame. And the existential connotations seem to me to be far more nuanced than Dutch or English — or Roy Wagner — would lead you to expect.

Pitta-Pitta has the root word ṉaŋka-, meaning ‘to remain, to sit, to exist’, and then derives the transitive ṉaŋka-ṛi, meaning “to have a baby”, but literally “to cause to exist” (Vol 1; 16).

Guugu Yimidhirr has wu-naa, meaning ‘lie down, sleep, exist’ (Vol 1; 80, 84), and the separate reflexive-only verb nhanda- for ‘finish, come to an end, cease to exist’ (Vol 1; 126). The language also has independent particles relevant to the semantics of non-existence:

We have already met the most im­portant of these: gaari ‘not’ and guya ‘none’. Gaari is the negative particle used with most verb forms and with nominal predicates as well. Ordinarily gaari precedes the word it negates, although it can also stand alone to mean simply ‘no’. The word guya behaves rather more like a predicate on its own, meaning ‘non-existent’; however, guya does not in­flect for case, behaving like a predicative-only adjective. Both gaari and guya occur with the emphatic suffix -gu: gaarigu ‘no, indeed’; guyaaygu ‘none at all’. (Particles in general, although they do not inflect for case or tense, al­low the emphatic suffix -gu.) (Vol 1; 151)

Some languages keep a tight connection between states-of-being and the abstract nouns. In Margany and Gunya,

English adjectives of state may be translated by verbs, but these are sometimes derived from abstract nouns, eg gabiṛa ‘to be hungry’ from gabiḍ ‘hunger’. The state of being hungry may also be denoted by a derived noun, in this case gabiḍaṛi, literally ‘hunger-having’ (Vol 2; 301).

But in others, one carves existence at finer ontological joints. In Ngan’gityemerri, Nicholas Reid identifies six intransitive posture/motion verbs — ‘sit’, ‘stand’, ‘lie’, ‘perch’, ‘go’, ‘travel’ — each with copula-like functions and existential meanings that seem to mark abstract qualities of the permanent/eternal and transient, animate and inanimate, dynamic and still.

And in Wajarri,

Hence one might say, in Wajarri, njinamanja for a human existing, ngayimanja for an animal existing, and kayimanja for a tree existing (Vol 2; 268). The ontology-bending constructions allowed by this grammar is something only conlangs can rival.

Diyari Is Amazing

At this point, if you’re me, that you’re probably thinking: okay, cool, but what about the original phrase, “to be or not to be”? Wagner-as-we-take-him is concerned with the ability to ‘make existence problematic’ in the domain of discourse. Can the postural verbs do this when they also have ontologically-complex ‘figurative’ meanings? What about the (implied) ‘exclusive or’ contrast between existence and non-existence? Do any Australian Aboriginal languages do this?

Honestly, I’m still not sure. But I tried it in one language.

Enter: Diyari, the language of the Dieri people, whose traditional lands sit in the Far North of South Australia, to the East of Lake Eyre. As with most of the languages I’ve been discussing, colonialism is fucked, and so at present there is only one truly fluent speaker alive: a 92-year-old woman. She’s got more than enough on her plate as it is. I’m not going to bother her.

Thankfully, there’s also one incredibly helpful linguist who she taught in the 1970s. He answered my emails.

Peter Austin’s “A Grammar of Diyari” began as a PhD thesis, but I mostly worked from the 2021 revised edition and an associated dictionary. In it, he notes that the language contains two copulative verbs: ngana- ‘to be’, and pantyi-, ‘to become’ (109). These are not used in the existential sense. Instead, much like Wajarri, there’s a fine-grained ontology that maps posture to existence:

Okay. That’s “to be”. What about “or” and “not”?

When I say “or” in English, it’s never totally obvious: do I mean an ‘inclusive or’ (“X or Y or both”) or an ‘exclusive or’ (“X or Y but not both”)? Diyari handles disjunctions such as ‘or’ — and states of uncertainty — with slightly more precision. Diyari has a particle wata, which means ‘not’, or ‘don’t’, and serves to negate a predicate clause, as in the sentence nganhi wata wanku, meaning “I am not a snake” (173).

The language also bakes uncertainty into low-level grammar. For example, it has kantyi for a expressing personal belief in a possibility (“could”; “maybe”), kaṟa for denoting something the speaker believes is a weaker (ie, less likely) possibility, and pinthi for reported rumour — that is, a situation where the speaker isn’t committing to the truth of the statement, but merely to the fact that someone else endorsed it.

Separately, Diyari uses the particle ya for sentence conjunction (‘and’). The word kaṟa is used in phrasal and sentence disjunctions for handling the ‘exclusive or’. For example from Austin (233, 236):

The -yi suffix denotes a present tense, and so a fragment translation for “to be or not to be” seems possible: ngamayi kaṟa wata ngamayi kaṟa; “to sit xor to not sit”; “to exist xor to not exist”.

… right?

In correspondence, our kind linguist points out that the abstract sense would probably need to be signalled explicitly in order for this to work at all: ngathu yakalkani yawarra ngamalkayi (“I have some question words”), followed by karna ngamarna kaṟa wata ngamarna kaṟa (“do people exist or not?”). Context makes it clear that we couldn’t be talking about the concrete here-and-now.

The trouble, of course, is that this isn’t what we (usually) take the Angsty Danish Prince to be asking in Hamlet. While we can clearly make existence problematic in one sense — we can ask “does X exist?” or “should X exist?” — such a translation doesn’t bind ontology to value, emotion, or the question of suicide. It’s not existentialism in the (possibly naïve) Western sense. It’s not all of what folks seem to want to call philosophy.

Quantifier Variance

One of my favourite anthropological fables comes third-hand from Bruno Latour, who was responding to the peace terms of Ulrich Beck. In full:

A historical anecdote, retold in a major paper by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, may illustrate why Beck’s suggested approach to peacemaking is not completely up to the task. The main example that Beck gives is the “Valladolid controversy,” the famous disputatio that Spaniards held to decide whether or not Indians had souls susceptible of being saved. But while that debate was under way, the Indians were engaged in a no less important one, though conducted with very different theories in mind and very different experimental tools. Their task, as Viveiros de Castro describes it, was not to decide if Spaniards had souls — that much seemed obvious — but rather if the conquistadors had bodies. The theory under which Amerindians were operating was that all entities share by default the same fundamental organization, which is basically that of humans. A licuri palm, a peccary, a piranha, a macaw: each has a soul, a language, and a family life modeled on the pattern of a human (Amerindian) village. Entities all have souls and their souls are all the same. What makes them differ is that their bodies differ, and it is bodies that give souls their contradictory perspectives: the perspective of the licuri palm, the peccary, the piranha, the macaw. Entities all have the same culture but do not acknowledge, do not perceive, do not live in, the same nature. For the controversialists at Valladolid, the opposite was the case but they remained blissfully unaware that there was an opposite side. Indians obviously had bodies like those of Europeans, but did they have the same spirit? Each side conducted an experiment, based on its own premises and procedures: on the one side to determine whether Indians have souls, and on the other side to determine whether Europeans have bodies. The Amerindians’ experiment was as scientific as the Europeans’. Conquistador prisoners were taken as guinea pigs and immersed in water to see, first, if they drowned and, second, if their flesh would eventually rot. This experiment was as crucial for the Amerindians as the Valladolid dispute was for the Iberians. If the conquerors drowned and rotted, then the question was settled; they had bodies. But if they did not drown and rot, then the conquerors had to be purely spiritual entities, perhaps similar to shamans. As Claude Lévi-Strauss summarized, somewhat ironically, the two experiments, the Spaniards’ versus the Amerindians’: “the whites were invoking the social sciences while the Indians had more confidence in the natural ones.”

The relevance of this anecdote should be apparent: at no point in the Valladolid controversy did the protagonists consider, even in passing, that the confrontation of European Christians and Amerindian animists might be framed differently from the way in which Christian clerics understood it in the sixteenth century. At no point were the Amerindians asked what issue they took to be in dispute, nor is Beck asking now. But asking that question is only the first step en route to adequate complexity. Was every European in agreement with every other? Were there not two (at least) solutions to the problem raised at Valladolid? Indians had souls like Christians or else Indians did not — each position had its partisans. Beck supposes there were only two solutions to the problem posed at Valladolid about Indian souls (they have souls, they do not have souls) and he ignores the other problem raised in South America about conquistador bodies (they have bodies, they do not have bodies). A negotiation between Europeans and Amerindians would thus be, at a minimum, four-sided. Bartolomé de Las Casas, the Dominican priest, held that Europeans and Amerindians were basically the same, and he complained of the un-Christian cruelty of Christians against their “Indian brothers.” But how would he have responded, how might his views have modified, had he witnessed the systematic drowning of his fellow Spaniards in a scientific experiment designed to assay their exact degree of bodily presence? Which “side” would Las Casas, after the experience, be on? As Viveiros de Castro has persuasively shown, the question of “the other,” so central to recent theory and scholarship, has been framed with inadequate sophistication. There are more ways to be other, and vastly more others, than the most tolerant soul alive can conceive. (451-3)

This is the problem. To say that none of the ~250+850 languages that Wagner generalised across “can have” existentialism is to assume a common ontology where no such ground has been established. It’s question-begging masquerading as comparative anthropology. In the case of the Diyari language, it is to assume that a notion like ‘existence’ can even be translated in a single word; it assumes that concepts of existence and temporal persistence are not entangled with connection and continuity with the Dreaming, when they plainly are. It also brushes past a far more compelling possibility: even and especially in a language that supposedly ‘does philosophy’ (ie, English), existence is a worryingly sloppy conceptual target.

Philosophy’s whole raison d’être is precision. You take concepts that are ill-defined and sharpen them; you firm things up; you clarify; you tighten definitions. And then, if you succeed, it stops being the domain of philosophy. If a language cannot “make existence problematic” — if the culture that operates the language cannot easily translate Hamlet’s confusion — that may be a feature, not a bug.

We admit this about the existential quantifier ∃ in symbolic logic: a phrase such as “there exists at least one such-and-such” is ambiguous, and many (seemingly) equally natural and adequate phrases (‘there are’, ‘there is’, ‘some’) accrue to it. While the natural language meanings seem synonymous in most cases, they come apart at the tails. This is true both in definition and in use. As Hilary Putnam put it, “the logical primitives themselves, and in particular the notions of object and existence, have a multitude of different uses rather than one absolute ‘meaning’ (71).

Trivially, the problem with quantifiers in symbolic logic — which elsewhere gets called “quantifier variance” (Sider 175) — is not a claim about the underlying nature of the world any more than a child’s angry protest that “you can’t step on the floor, dad, you’ll die!” is. As Eli Hirsch puts it,

I take it for granted that the world and the things in it exist for the most part in complete independence of our knowledge or language. Our linguistic choices do not determine what exists, but determine what we are to mean by the words “what exists” and related words. (220)

No, ‘quantifier variance’ is just the observation that language — even the most essential-seeming language of ‘existence’ — is a coordinating technology and not a thing that carries (or enacts) deep metaphysics. Languages evolve and are engineered only to certain tolerances. Words work for uses and domains. They’re not themselves The World.

Translating Hamlet into Diyari is the same. If you’re a realist and a pragmatist — which you probably should be; deep anti-realism is insane — then it turns out you can’t claim that only some languages have the ability to “make existence problematic” in their domains of discourse without tripping yourself up. You yourself failed to make existence problematic, because your language isn’t the territory, either.

Or, in the aphoristic phrase that Eduardo Viveiros de Castro credits to Wagner: “every understanding of another culture, an experiment with one’s own” (7).