A meditation on language

As a child I would listen to our father read from the national epic, the Kalevipoeg, enthralled. The words on the page had a magic to their look and sound. Growing older, I wondered if learning Estonian would open up a new way of thinking about the world, or about life. Then on visiting the old country in 2023, it felt that such thoughts were overdone. The Estos we met are much like New Zealanders - matter of fact though cautious in their praise of others, reserved in expressing feelings, and as used to the outdoors as we are. Estonians have less tendency to waste time when conversing, if there is a difference at all.

That was a point of view, until I started reading Valdur Mikita’s Forestonia (2020). Mikita’s train of thought is that there is something in the language that to this day binds Estonians to a deep sense of nature and place, to be found in everyday culture and way of life.

He argues the rest of Europe has largely taken on the post-war American dream – economic growth, consumerism – and has lost sight of a simpler, deeper appreciation of life and nature, or of a deeper connection with both. Relaxing at the summer house, unwinding in the sauna, looking for mushrooms, gazing into the fire, that sort of thing.  

Mikita argues that to this day Estonians retain a sense of the magical in their relationship with nature, a kind of animism, a perception that their surroundings are alive, not just the animals, also the forest, stones, the rivers and lakes.

In support of this view, he says the Estonian language lends itself to sense switching, e.g. seeing sounds or smells as colours. Also called synaesthesia, a condition that very few people naturally experience, Estonian (and other Uralic languages) opens the door more easily to multi-sensory perception to those who speak and understand it.

Other angles

This reminds me again of a haiku the 17th century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho wrote: “old pond / a frog jumps into / the sound of water”.

Of this haiku, Jane Reichhold writes, “the frog not only jumps into the water but also into the sound of water. The mind-puzzle that this haiku creates is how to separate the frog from the water, the sound of the water from the water, the frog from the sound it will make on entering water, and the sound from the old pond. It cannot be done because all these factors are one, but the reader arrives at this truth through having the senses scrambled.”

Something similar turns up in this passage from Peter Matthiessen’s Himalayan travelogue and reflections on Zen, The Snow Leopard (1978): “The Hopi does not say ‘the light flashed’ but merely ‘flash’, without subject or time element; time cannot move because it is also space. The two are never separated; there are no words or expressions referring to time or space as separate from each other.”

In Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940) the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges describes a fictitious language in these terms. “The planet Tlön have no nouns in their language, thus there are no genuine objects, only happenings, and ‘reality’ is not spatial, but successive through time,” (The Cambridge Companion to Borges (2013)).

Borges (1899-1986) was exploring the concept of “subjective reality”, that reality is not objective but that the beholder is inextricably part of it. He was a Modernist writer who was familiar with, and struck by Einstein’s special and general relativity, and the fast-developing field of quantum physics.

Back to Estonia

Theoretically, Borges could have been channelling the ideas of an Estonian or Baltic German pioneer of biosemiotics, Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1945): “He introduced the concept of subjectivity to biology; he made the claim that each species has a unique, subjective perception of its environment which determines its behaviour,” (New World Encyclopedia).

In his view, the environment is not an objectively determined fixed world common to all species, but the environment is formed subjectively according to each species. This he called Umwelt.

Uexküll thought about how different living organisms – a fly, a dog, a tick, a human - would perceive, say, a meadow, and also how they would perceive time in consideration of their relative lifespans.

In his day, few academics took Uexküll’s ideas seriously; however, he went on to found a field of biology, which for some decades has occupied a home at the University of Tartu, thanks to various pioneers, including Kalevi Kull and his students.

I asked Chat GPT about professor Kull, and here’s a sample: “Kull is one of the most important modern interpreters of Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt. He expanded Umwelt theory to show how organisms actively construct their meaningful worlds. He linked Umwelt not just to perception, but to development, behaviour, and evolution.”

He played a key role in shaping biosemiotics into a coherent theoretical discipline, not as an add-on to biology, but fundamental to life itself.

So, how is it that Estonians are among the leaders in such an insightful field of biology - the idea that living things are not just chemicals responding passively to their environment; they are active players in their world, finding meaning in signs they draw from nature, and interpreting and acting upon them.

Perhaps, there is something about the Estonian language after all that has enabled Estonians to think along unique lines.

“Becoming Estonian” would be eestlaseks in the old tongue. Of the 14 different noun endings, the translative case is the one I find most challenging. Estonians call this saav, which means “being able to”, so it is an aspirational or transformational idea, as my textbooks explain:

“The translative case indicates a change in condition (becoming something) or a period of time (for how long).” (Estonian for Beginners by Winifred Oser and Tiiu Salasoo, 1982).

“The translative case … as its name implies, it is used to indicate a change of state. But the translative case can also be used with time expressions to indicate ‘for’ or ‘to’ or ‘by’ some occasion or time.” (Colloquial Estonian by Christopher Moseley, 1994).

“The translative case indicates what someone or something is turning into. In other words, the translative case expresses a change in identity or condition.” (Estonian Textbook by Juhan Tulduva, 1994).

I cannot help but think that Borges would agree with a train of thought whereby Estonian is a language that embodies space-time and a holistic view of life. As a contrast to subjective reality, Borges wrote of the catastrophes that reductionist, mechanistic thinking can unleash, whether societal or personal.

In The Circular Ruins, an old shaman imagines after repeated efforts a son into being. As the boy grows up, the shaman fears that should he come into contact with fire, which will not harm him, he will realise that he is not real but a phantom. One day while deep in meditation, the shaman perceives too late that the vegetation around him has caught fire, which now surrounds him. He decides to end his life by walking into the flames, only to get the shock of his life.

“When the flames don’t consume him, he realises that he, too, is someone else’s dream. The message? We are not masters of our constructions. We are in them – and they are in us; we co-participate in the universal process of becoming.”