Linguist No. 7: Andreas Fine Licht, in the novel Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow* by Peter Høeg (1992)
I won’t recount the novel’s complicated plot (you can find a summary here). In this episode, our heroine Smilla Jespersen consults Andreas because she needs information on an audio tape that has come into her possession. It is a man speaking, and she needs help identifying the man, what he’s talking about, and where he does the talking. Since the man on the tape is speaking a form of Greenlandic, Dr. Fine Licht’s expertise in Inuit languages comes into play.
To her amazement, Andreas Fine Licht not only deciphers what the man is saying, he also identifies the exact location where the tape was recorded. In addition, he is able to create a brief biographical sketch of the speaker from this speech sample. His approach is essentially based on the same assumption that Henry Higgins deployed: “In every human utterance lies the sum total of that person’s linguistic past.” Talk long enough, and someone with the right knowledge can assemble that past, and along with it, at least part of your biography.
Here’s his diagnosis of Smilla’s own speech and what it reveals: “You’re in your mid-thirties. Grew up in Thule or north of there. One or both parents Inuit. You came to Denmark after assimilating the entire linguistic foundation of Greenlandic, but before you lost the child’s instinctive talent of learning a foreign language perfectly. Let’s say you were between seven and eleven years old. After that it gets more difficult. There are traces of several sociolects. Perhaps you lived or went to school in the northern suburbs [of Copenhagen]. There is also a trace of a North Sealand accent. And strangely enough, even a later hint of West Greenlandic.”
The case of Andreas Fine Licht demonstrates another important thing: that in order to perform this sort of analysis successfully, you need to have a very large base of knowledge. His analysis of Smilla’s speech requires him to know how people talk in the Copenhagen suburbs, what West Greenlandic sounds like, and other linguistic data. If he lacks any part of this knowledge, his language-based biographical sketch of Smilla will be incomplete, and possibly inaccurate. Importantly, he realizes where he is certain and where he is speculating (“after that it gets more difficult”).
Andreas also has a disadvantage that he has turned into an advantage. He has been blind for most of his life, and he credits his blindness with sharpening his auditory skills to a level that any recording engineer would envy. From the background noise on the tape, he is able to discern that it was recorded at the US Air Force base at Thule (“Where in the world can an East Greenlandic hunter sit and talk in a restaurant…where a Dane is yelling in American English, and where you can hear an airport in the background?”).
As if to underline both Andreas’ analytical skills and his dependence on highly specific knowledge, he next displays his deep knowledge of jazz (“my passion”). There’s a bit of music at the end of the tape, and from the distinctive playing style, Andreas is able to identify exactly who is playing the trumpet on it, due to his exhaustive knowledge of the various concerts played by the John Coltrane Quartet.
From a fiction-writing point of view, one notes an interesting mix of the real and the fabricated. Andreas Fine Licht is not a real person, but he studied with one, the Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev. Andreas says that Hjelmslev had “a solid knowledge of forty or fifty languages” (which is implausible, for reasons I have discussed elsewhere). The John Coltrane Quartet was very real, but the trumpeter heard on the tape, Roy Louber, apparently was not. Which is probably a good thing, since he is described as a suicidal drunk, and even makes a brief appearance later as a character in the story. (Any real, living Roy Louber could have taken severe exception to this.)
There’s an interesting distinction in this case between what one might call professional knowledge and hobbyist knowledge. Andreas can analyze language because he is a linguist by education. However, it’s only his amateur passion for jazz that allows him to answer all of Smilla’s questions. In this detail, I see a hint that professionals need to be open to the world outside their specialization to put all the pieces together. To those of us who don’t know any Greenlandic dialects, who are ignorant about the geography of Greenland, and who are not passionate jazz fans, this tape is just noise. If we know about one or two of these things, we can go some way toward making sense of the noise. But we need all three to get the complete picture.
*This is the British title; the American edition was called Smilla’s Sense of Snow. Since I read the British version, I use that title.