Sunrise/Sunset Language: Further Thoughts

Jeff sent me this reply after reading my previous post:

Completely agree with all your points, and yes, as far as I know, all languages basically refer to the Earth, sun, moon, and stars as if we were standing on a dinner plate, and the sky were a concave shell above us.

That said...

Some part of my subconscious has been kicking around ideas about what is 'natural' for humans insofar as we *do* strive to improve ourselves, and in particular to see things from other points of view, and consciously (and subconsciously) change ourselves based on that. There's no question that one of the great strengths of humans is that we *can* (when we try) understand other points of view, and even, to some extent, adopt them. You mention, for example, the coyote: naturally we wouldn't expect a coyote's perspective to be like a human's, and we would not expect a coyote to try and adopt a human perspective (although certain dogs do a very good job of it), and we would not ever expect any human to completely grok a coyote's perspective. But some humans, with years of study, do come to understand coyotes extremely well -- better than, say, rabbits understand coyotes, or bees understand coyotes. And because of this plasticity of mind (which goes hand in hand with the neoteny of our physiology), the question of what is 'natural' for human beings is rather complex.

To be specific: for humans who grew up and lived all their lives on a space station orbiting the moon, it would be completely natural for them to adopt new words for the motion of the sun, words that might have more in common with the 'objective' perspective than what most languages use. (Or perhaps not: they might still use perspective-centric language, e.g. the sun is "coming out", i.e. from behind the Earth or the Moon.) This wouldn't mean that they were unnatural humans, nor yet that they were less anthropocentric. But they'll have adopted a perspective quite foreign to any other species of Earth life.

So... since this is probably rather muddled, let me summarize. I completely agree with you, AND I think it's interesting to note that we humans have this plasticity of mind that makes it difficult to say exactly what is 'natural' for a human being. And as we alter our environment through developments in technology and culture, our neoteny and plasticity will only increase. It will be fascinating to see what strange ways of being human we develop in the next ten thousand years. :-)

Very excellent points. I don't think I have anything to add, other than that I think appreciating the plasticity of human nature and human language means, to a certain extent, explicitly allowing and making room for that plasticity. While that might mean sculpting and shaping our language consciously in some ways, it also means allowing language to evolve naturally. In this case I do not think it means excising certain terms completely and attempting to replace them with others in accordance with a predetermined ideology, especially not one that posits that it is fundamentally problematic to even acknowledge our human perspective.

In the other comments responding to Rua Lupa's post, some readers have offered very poetic alternatives, and poetry is exactly the right place where this type of language play is at its best. (There are plenty of examples where poetry has been the source of new words or phrases, too, so in that way poetry is not only the perfect place for language play, but the most nourishing soil for the evolution and growth of language as well.) I am by no means saying we shouldn't experiment with language or explore its depths or flexibility. Please yes, let's do.

Sunrise/Sunset: Can We Even Be Less Human?

Over on No Unsacred Place, Rua Lupa has a post up that pretty much epitomizes one of the problems with much of modern environmentalist rhetoric: the existential angst of being human.

She is specifically looking at the (supposedly problematic) language of saying "sunrise" and "sunset," which takes for granted an earth-centric perspective rather than acknowledging the scientific fact that the earth revolves around the sun and not vice versa.

If I'd wanted to be a real dick, I could have pointed out that according to Einstein's theory of relativity, we are in fact perfectly justified in talking about the sun (and indeed the entire cosmos) as revolving around the earth, if that happens to be our perspective. But I restrained.

The real issue is that many environmentalists are still stuck in the inherited worldview that says humans are "naturally" fallen and sinful creatures and can't do anything right. Therefore, what humans do is bad, and the problem with the planet is humans. Not the specific things that humans do, but simply the humans themselves. Thus, you get existential angst (or politically correct righteousness, or both) over something as innocuous as language that describes the sun as rising and setting.

This was the comment I left on the post:

I haven't heard of any ecocentric folks raising objections to the terms sunrise/sunset -- in fact, this is the first I've heard of it being a problem. I happen to agree with "Nobody" in the first comment above.

Acknowledging that humans have a particular perspective and that human language will reflect that perspective is not inherently anthropocentric.

Artificially trying to surpress our natural, intuitive relationship with our surroundings by adopting constrained language is unlikely to fix the problem, either, in my opinion. Language is itself a living, evolving thing, not a construct that we can meddle with and manipulate as we like. That's not to say that trying to craft more conscientious language isn't sometimes helpful, but I have my doubts about how effective it would be to try to force unnatural/awkward phrasings into the language to replace ones that already serve perfectly well. Words, like organisms, fill niches when they are needed, and a word without a niche to fill is not going to survive for very long.

I'd also point out -- and this might be rocking the boat a bit -- that for most of the hundreds of thousands of years since the evolution of the human species, we've largely been ignorant of the facts of modern science. But that has not necessarily resulted in us being worse human beings, or even worse animal citizens of the planet. We don't worry if the coyote has a coyote-centric perspective of the world, and we tend to assume that it does and that this is perfectly fine. In fact, we can't help but have a view of the world that is defined by our own humanness -- trying to have any other kind of view would be, well, inhuman. And one thing the planet does not need us to be is any more inhuman than we already act. (So many of our screw ups have come from us thinking that we can engineer ourselves into being better humans than the species the planet made us.)

Let's root out the actual ideologies that are problematic and destructive and put our energies into deconstructing those, rather identifying our humanness itself as the problem.

I should check this with Jeff, but it might even be that this is a problem specific to the English language (or a handful of related languages) and not universal to all human languages. If it is universal (which, given just how basic an experience it is to not just humans but pretty much everything on the planet, is the most likely), it tells us something fascinating and valuable about how we experience the world. I think we're better off learning from and appreciating that perspective, rather than trying to surpress it.

ETA: I couldn't help but follow up, in response to Rua Lupa asking another commenter to define (without reference to a dictionary) what a sunrise/sunset actually is:

Arguably, the terms "sunrise" and "sunset" refer to the specific event of the sun rising above or sinking below the horizon line from the perspective of a particular point on the surface of the earth.

In other words, the event itself is place-specific, it is necessarily related to a particular location and the perspective of (e.g. the horizon as viewed from) that location. It would be nonsensical to talk about the position of the sun in relation to the horizon without referring to a specific location.

So I'm not clear how you plan to replace these words/concepts with terms that are place-nonspecific. The very attempt to do so is a kind of ideological blinder, an attempt to universalize what is inherently and by definition a localized event.

I've done too much flying this year. I've experienced firsthand that sunrise/sunset is relative to your location, and to try to talk differently about it is bound to cause problems.