70 Books & arts The EconomistAugust 10th 2019
2 made in 2016 with Richard Flanagan, a
Booker prizewinning Australian novelist,
to document the refugee crisis in Greece,
Lebanon and Serbia. Thousands of life-
jackets were scattered on the shore, like
neon memento moris. Made from flimsy
materials that would never float, they were
“death jackets”, Mr Flanagan wrote; tomb-
stones in disguise. In Australia, which was
dispatching refugees to a legal limbo on re-
mote islands, Mr Quilty’s paintings are a
call for compassion.
Blurring the line between art and activ-
ism can be risky. “There is a danger that hewill become such a public figure that he
will more or less end up being viewed as a
media persona, rather than a serious art-
ist,” says Sasha Grishin of Australian Na-
tional University. Mr Quilty has duly at-
tracted criticism from the right—a tabloid
commentator scorned him as a “politically
fashionable” favourite of the left—and
from a handful on the left as well. “I’ve
been called a bleeding heart like it’s an of-
fence,” Mr Quilty says, shaking his head.
His show—now relocated to the Gallery
of Modern Art in Brisbane, from which it
will move to the Art Gallery of New SouthWales in Sydney—grapples with violence,
trauma and loss. Yet often his paintings
have an endearingly witty touch. In “Joe
Burger”, a sweetly funny ode to parenting,
he casts his infant son as a technicolour
chubby-cheeked burger bun. In his “Bud-
gie” series, the yellow and green birds re-
semble the pompous busts of statesmen.
“Bottom Feeders” presents a stark-naked
Father Christmas drinking, smoking and
peeing on a pot-plant. You need both beau-
ty and humour, Mr Quilty reckons, “if you
want to tell stories about the darker side of
the human condition”. 7Johnson Big and basic
Why widely spoken languages have simpler grammarS
talin spokeRussian as a second
language. The Georgian dictator of the
Soviet Union had a noticeable accent and
is said to have mumbled his case-end-
ings. The tale indicates two things. One is
that learning new languages is hard,
even with a great deal of exposure. (Stalin
started learning Russian at around ten
and spoke it all his adult life.) The other
is that languages are more complex than
they need to be. Not having mastered all
Russian’s finer points didn’t keep Stalin
from ruling the Soviet Union with a
murderously effective iron hand.
Russian really is hard for learners,
and a casual comparison might serve the
conclusion that big, prestigious lan-
guages like Russian are complex. Just
look, after all, at their rich, technical
vocabularies, and the complex industrial
societies that they serve.
But linguists who have compared
languages systematically are struck by
the opposite conclusion. They tend to
find that “big” languages—spoken by
large numbers over a big land area—are
actually simpler than small, isolated
ones. This is largely because linguists,
unlike laypeople, focus on grammar, not
vocabulary. Consider Berik, spoken in a
few villages in eastern Papua. It may not
have a word for “supernova”, but it drips
with complex rules: a mandatory verb
ending tells what time of day the action
occurred, and another indicates the size
of the direct object. Of course these
things can be said in English, but Berik
requires them. Remote societies may be
materially simple; “primitive”, their
languages are not.
Systematically so: a study in 2010 of
thousands of tongues found that smaller
languages have more Berik-style gram-
matical bits and pieces attached to
words. By contrast, bigger ones tend to bepoints for communicating successfully
over 16 rounds. (They “talked” by key-
board and were forbidden to use their
native language, Dutch.)
Over time both big and small groups
got better at making themselves un-
derstood, but the bigger ones did so by
creating more systematic languages as
they interacted, with fewer idiosyncra-
sies. The researchers suppose that this is
because the members of the larger
groups had fewer interactions with each
other member; this put pressure on them
to come up with clear patterns. Smaller
groups could afford quirkier languages,
because their members got to “know”
each other better.
Neither the more systematic nor the
more idiosyncratic languages were
“better”, given group size: the small and
large groups communicated equally
well. But the work provides evidence that
an idiosyncratic language is best suited
to a small group with rich shared history.
As the language spreads, it needs to
become more predictable.
Taken with previous studies, the new
research offers a two-part answer to why
grammar rules are built—and lost. As
groups grow, the need for systematic
rules becomes greater; unlearnable
in-group-speak with random variation
won’t do. But languages develop more
rules than they need; as they are learned
by foreign speakers joining the group,
some of these get stripped away. This can
explain why pairs of closely related
languages—Tajik and Persian, Icelandic
and Swedish, Frisian and English—differ
in grammatical complexity. In each
couple, the former language is both
smaller and more isolated. Systematicity
is required for growth. Lost complexity is
the cost of foreigners learning your
language. It is the price of success.like English or Mandarin, in which words
change their form little if at all. No one
knows why, but a likely culprit is the very
scale and ubiquity of such widely travelled
languages.
As a language spreads, more foreigners
come to learn it as adults (thanks to con-
quest and trade, for example). Since lan-
guages are more complex than they need
to be, many of those adult learners will—
Stalin-style—ignore some of the niceties
where they can. If those newcomers have
children, the children will often learn a
slightly simpler version of the language
from their parents.
But a new study, conducted at the Max
Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics at
Nijmegen in the Netherlands, has found
that it is not entirely foreigners and their
sloppy ways that are to blame for lan-
guages becoming simpler. Merely being
bigger was enough. The researchers, Limor
Raviv, Antje Meyer and Shiri Lev-Ari, asked
12 groups of four strangers and 12 groups of
eight to invent languages to describe a
group of moving shapes on the screen.
They were told that the goal was to rack up