Wittgenstein and Motorcycle Maintenance

Took my motorcycle to be worked on in Kampong Cham the other day. Found a Cambodian on National Route 7, before you get to town, who specializes in larger bikes (mine is a medium-sized Honda CL 400 cc; 25,000 Cambodian kilometers and counting :).

As almost all Cambodian businesses are, this one is a family business. His wife and two sons can be seen lubricating my motorcycle's chain in the picture below.

As I watched the father and his son work on my motorcycle, it struck me how easily the son would find the tools that the father needed. It was not just a surprise because the shop was not very well organized -- though it appeared that the disorganization was deceptive, the kid would invariably get to the right tool (though maybe not the right size) very quickly. But where did the language for all those different tools come from?

That question led to a stream of thought about how language grows to accomodate technological change and availability. (And to a distinction between technology that you discover/build/make and technology to which you are a relative late-comer, but which you use. Make versus use. Can one find interesting differences in linguistic outcomes (and causal patterns) by focusing on this distinction? And how would you go about it?)

I was reminded of the passages in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations about bricks and slabs (more in a later post if the off-hand thought makes any sense or contribution to this line of inquiry). The interesting aspect to this is that there is no tradition of building motorcycles (or computers, handphones, or cars and trucks) in Cambodia, though the business of repairing them has become very important (handphone shops, used handphone offerings, the entire infrastructure has proliferated madly in a very short period of time).

As I sat there I wondered how the language evolved to make it possible to coordinate the various actions of repair (and to facilitate the teaching of repair). Even the tools needed are imported, they are used, not made.

(Take the simple ink pen. Cambodians never produced any. They don't now. They still call it by the French word Bic, which of course is not French for pen, but rather the first major manufacturer of pens that the Cambodians encountered. Reminding me when I was a kid, we never said "make a photocopy", we said "Xerox it". Could have been another machine, but never mind that. :)

But motorcycles get repaired, even though the stance of Cambodians toward motorbikes and motorcycles is that of user and not creater (builder or maker). The language of repair and parts might be (in part) imported, borrowed, but much is likely to be invented (metaphorically) to build the local linguistic institutions of repair and use.

In the back of my mind, these could be places where one might do some very interesting investigation.​