Last night I was watching a Japanese movie, which meant that I was reading it, too, since it was subtitled and I don't have the faintest grasp of the language. In one tense scene two crime bosses confront each other. One is alone; one has his cronies with him. The two have been enemies in the past, but also have a lot in common. Both are speaking for themselves and for their organizations. You can cut the ambiguity with a knife. The two men stand a little aside, exchange courtesies with an undercurrent of hostility, and then one of them says -- well, something in Japanese. As he speaks, this is what I read:
"This town belongs to us."
It could be a line straight from an American mob movie, and if you heard it, you'd know exactly what was going on. But when you read it, as I did, it's almost impossible to decipher. It could mean:
"This town belongs to me and my goons -- not to you." (Exclusive "us")
"This town belongs to us all -- you, me, and our organizations" (Inclusive "us")
"This town belongs to you and me alone -- not those goons over there." (Dual "us")
In English we scarcely notice these distinctions, even though they're almost always important. We rely on context, partly, to make matters clear. Non-verbal cues lend additional support: if you declare that "All this is ours" while sweeping your gaze over the horizon, we know immediately that you mean it belongs to everyone. Say the same thing while looking directly at someone, and it's a strong indicator of exclusiveness -- ours and ours alone. And when all else fails, we use stress. Recognize the pattern of this exchange?
"This turf is ours now, Rocco."
"Ours, eh?"
"No, you idiot -- ours."
The stress reverse the sense. Rocco's not part of the picture, he's being cut out of it.
But subtitles don't have stress, and since they're not closely synchronized with the speaker's gaze or gestures, you're left adrift. For all I know, it may have been deliberately ambiguous in Japanese, too -- it was that kind of film.
If they had been speaking Algonquin, and I had been understanding it, there would have been no problem. Algonquin has quite separate words for inclusive and exclusive "we". It even distinguishes between the "he" you're talking immediately about and the "he" that's remote. So the following isn't funny at all in Algonquin:
"Wadsworth woke to a thundering sound in the middle of the night and shot an elephant in his pajamas."
"Gads! How did an elephant get hold of his pajamas?"
Not funny because it's impossible to say it. The first "his" would have to be chosen to clearly indicate either the man who is the immediate subject of the sentence, or the secondary elephant. There's no catch-all "his" as English has.
This inclusion-exclusion distinction isn't a rarity or a curio. It's actually a basic grammatical feature in a great number of languages; none of them happen to be Indo-European, that's all, so we never encounter the distinction in most of the writing or speaking we're exposed to. It probably gives us a better fund of jokes, too.
Dutch, in many ways so much like English, is the big exception. They've invented the handy device of "stressed" pronouns. It's like italics in spoken form. When you want to talk, in a general way, about "we" in Dutch, you say:
"we"
But when you want to stress the "we", usually to give it more focus, you say:
"wij"
Not only "we" but every other pronoun comes in the same two forms. It's a marvelously flexible device, for while it usually specifies greater inclusiveness, it can be used whenever you want to draw a momentary distinction: between someone here and someone over there, or something mentioned earlier as opposed to immediately. It's so expressive that it's pretty much my entire motivation for learning a little Dutch one day and vacationing in the Netherlands -- just to get a chance to say what I really mean for a while.
More on Dutch and the marvel that is Algonquin
It was Bronowski, many a year ago now, who said that the scientist in his earthly lab rarely pauses to adjust for the influence of the stars on his experiments. And yet we have only to look up at night to see Sirius shining to realize that photons from that star, 8 light-years away, have very much of an effect on the cells and chemistry of the eye. The lesson is that we are connected to the furthest fabric of the universe, not just conceptually but practically, as a matter of everyday fact.
Bronowski would have been pleased at the news from the Technical University of Munich where scientists have found a distinct band of iron-60 in rock from the oceanic crust. Iron-60 (as far as we know) in the quantities found can only be made in a supernova, which means that particles of iron were ejected across space several million years ago, traversed a hundred light-years or more, and sprinkled themselves across the earth. Iron is taken up by plants and practically everything else alive. It is not only our eyes, then, that respond to stellar light: we are made in part of stardust ourselves.
The lesson from physics is that space is vast and light is slow. You could sail around the earth twice at an easy pace in the time it takes light to arrive from the nearest star. Matter is magnificently slower than light, and the fact that we are being gently dusted by the particles of stars that have overcome distances that require scientific notation testifies that the remote stars are not remote, nor their emanations trivial; that the heavens are bound up in us not as a matter of geologic history, but as a fact of daily existence. Matter, indeed, finds its way to place light cannot, and if it is not swift, it is patient. When meteors strike Mars, fragments of that planet are cast into space and sometimes land here; pieces of Mars are found lying in Antartica for the taking. When winds blow overseas, dust from Africa settles on America. Physicists these days are more attentive to the stars, and make minute corrections for their influences on just about everything. Iron-60 is the latest voice reminding us to pay attention to everything else.
Dust from the stars, dust on the earth, and the great man himself