On taxonomy

I think every biology teacher I’ve ever had has rolled her eyes at the thought of taxonomists. They are necessary people, yes — they speak Latin — but they are (apparently) kind of a drag to be around.

Hence my (slight) reluctance to admit my fascination with taxonomy and my own catalogic tendencies. I’m obsessed with Borges’ Chinese Encyclopedia, for one thing, in which animals are fitted into categories like “belonging to the emperor,” “fantastic,” and “that from a long way off look like flies.” Also, I have recently discovered the OED Historical Thesaurus — a taxonomy of every entry in the Oxford English Dictionary — which is incomprehensible but astoundingly poetic. Here, for example, is how you may reach the word ‘shell’:

the external world > abstract properties > existence > substantiality or concreteness > unsubstantiality or abstractness > [noun] > unsubstantiality or lack of substance > superficiality or hollowness > superficial or hollow thing ►shell (1791)

How is “unsubstantiality or abstractness” a sub-set of “substantiality or concreteness”? Why is it “unsubstantiality” instead of “insubstantiality”? Can’t a shell also be a tangible thing, and if so, why is it considered an “abstract property”? Dare I question the methods of the OED?

One of my professors recently asked us to make a list, from memory, of every book we’d ever read, and to then somehow organize this list. How to organize everything I can ever remember reading in my life? Right now, my categories are kind of boring — “books from childhood,” “poetry & drama,” that sort of thing. But might it not be more accurate to have categories like:

• books I read when I was probably too young for them;
• books I refuse to travel without;
• books whose titles I have lost;
• books I wish I had more opportunity to quote from;
• books I claim to have read but haven’t exactly read read ... ?

And — since this is an assignment for a translation class — shouldn’t I also include “books I tend to think about in German” or “books I tend to think about in French” or “books whose original language I will probably never be able to read”?

But actually translation and taxonomy seem to me to be natural partners. Taxonomy is merely the art of making distinctions, and therefore every language is a kind of taxonomy; every language makes different types of distinctions. In Latin or Russian, for example — languages with complex case systems — it is important to distinguish the role of each noun: is it singular, plural, masculine, feminine, a direct or an indirect object? The case ending will tell you. In Chinese, par contre, what is important about nouns is not what they are doing, really, but what they are. Each noun is accompanied by a “measurement word”, which indicates a sort of category: “long soft things,” like fish and feathers, have one measurement word, and “long hard things” like pencils and dogs (?!) have another. Books have their own measurement word, and so do people, and so do cups.

What do these taxonomies tell us? More about the culture than about the objects themselves, I suspect. To go back to my list of books: what would happen if I organized them, not into piles, but into a continuum — based on color, for example, or length, or by when I read them or how much I love them? Would the way I organize my reading material — that is to say, my past — determine my relationship to it?