When the Greeks say it’s all Chinese

When an English speaker hits a sentence they cannot make head or tail of — a tax form, a legal clause, a page of equations — they reach for a ready-made phrase: it’s all Greek to me. It is such a natural thing to say that almost nobody stops to ask the obvious question. Greek to whom? And if the English blame the Greeks, who do the Greeks blame?

The answer turns out to be one of the most quietly delightful patterns in all of language. Pull the thread and you find that the whole world is busy passing the same parcel of bafflement from hand to hand — and that it very nearly always ends up in the same lap.

A note in the margin

Start with where the English phrase came from. It descends from a line of medieval Latin: Graecum est; non legitur — “it is Greek; it cannot be read.” Monks copying manuscripts across Western Europe worked comfortably in Latin, but Greek had largely fallen out of their learning, so when a Greek passage appeared in a text they were transcribing they would simply note in the margin that this stretch was unreadable and move on. The incomprehensible had a name, and the name was Greek.

The saying entered English for good through the theatre. In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1599), the conspirators are trying to find out what Cicero said in the forum, and Casca, who does not speak Greek, waves the question away: “those that understood him smiled at one another and shook their heads; but, for mine own part, it was Greek to me.” Shakespeare did not coin the expression — other writers of the age used similar lines — but he fixed it in the language, and four centuries later we are still quoting a man confessing he could not follow a speech.

Everyone points somewhere else

Here is where it gets strange. English is almost alone in blaming Greek. Walk the phrase around the map and watch the finger swing to a different target in nearly every country.

• A German says das kommt mir spanisch vor — “that seems Spanish to me.”
• A Spaniard, in turn, says me suena a chino — “that sounds Chinese to me.”
• The French, too, say c’est du chinois, “it’s Chinese” (though sometimes c’est de l’hébreu, “it’s Hebrew”).
• Italians reach for Arabic: per me è arabo, “for me it’s Arabic.”
• Poles say to dla mnie chińszczyzna — Chinese again — and Russians speak of китайская грамота, “Chinese writing.”
• And the Greeks — the very people everyone imagines at the bottom of the heap — look right past themselves and say αυτά μου φαίνονται κινέζικα — “this looks like Chinese to me.”

So the English give the Greeks a reputation the Greeks immediately hand on to someone else. Draw an arrow from each language to the one it names, and you get a map that scholars have actually plotted — a picture the linguist Mark Liberman once called the directed graph of stereotypical incomprehensibility. The arrows are not a circle. They are a current, and they flow in one direction.

Every language has a word for the language it cannot understand. Almost none of them choose their own.

Where the arrows stop

Follow the current downstream and it pools, overwhelmingly, at one language: Chinese. In a paper for the journal Lingvisticæ Investigationes, the scholar Arnold L. Rosenberg gathered these expressions from language after language and found a rough global consensus — Chinese was the tongue most often named as the hardest, the one the greatest number of other languages pointed to as the very emblem of the unreadable. Greek and Spanish and Arabic take their turns, but Chinese sits downstream of them all.

Which raises one last question, the best one. If every language blames another, what does Chinese blame? Where does the buck stop when you have run out of other people’s languages to accuse?

It stops by leaving human language altogether. A Mandarin speaker faced with gibberish does not reach for the name of some further country. They call it 天书 (tiānshū), “heavenly script,” a book written by the gods that no mortal was ever meant to read. Or they say it sounds like the twittering of birds. In Taiwan the fashionable version is 火星文, “Martian language.” Having no one left on Earth to point at, Chinese points at the sky.

The comfort hidden in the joke

It is tempting to read all this as a story about difficulty, a ranking of languages from easy to hopeless. But that is exactly the wrong lesson, and the arrows show why. The phrase does not measure how hard a language is; it measures how far away it feels from where you are standing. Move your standpoint and the whole map redraws. To a Greek child, Greek is not the final boss of languages — it is the first thing they ever understood.

That is worth remembering the next time a language you are learning feels like heavenly script. The wall you are staring at is not a property of the words. It is the gap between you and them, and a gap is the one kind of obstacle that closes a little every time you meet it. The billion people for whom Chinese is effortless are not cleverer than you; they simply stood next to it long enough that it stopped being Chinese and started being speech.

Where vocabla fits

Every word in a new language begins as a little piece of “Greek” — a shape that means nothing, that your eye slides off. What turns it from gibberish into language is not a better definition or a cleverer trick. It is proximity: meeting the word again and again, in real sentences, in many voices, until the distance between you and it quietly closes and you find, one day, that you simply understand it.

That is the whole wager of vocabla, in all six of its languages. It does not try to make a hard language easy by ranking it or drilling it or promising a shortcut. It just keeps bringing the words back into your path — as many times as it takes — because that is the only thing that has ever moved a word across the gap from Greek to me to mine. No language is heavenly script forever. It only stays unreadable until you start to read it.