Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

by Guy Deutscher

  Nature’s concessions to culture are now starting to feel a little more grudging. While it is hardly unsettling that abstract concepts such as “mind,” or “esprit,” are culturally dependent, we are getting to the edge of the comfort zone with the notion that pronouns like “we” or body parts like “hand” or “neck” all depend on the particular cultural conventions of our society. But if the forays of culture into the realm of concepts are beginning to hurt a little, all this is but a pinprick compared with the pains caused by culture’s interference in the area that will occupy us in the first part of the book. In this field of language, culture’s incursion into the land of concepts so offended, even outraged, plain common sense that for decades the defenders of nature were mobilized to fight to their last drop of ink to uphold her cause. In consequence, this enclave has been at the center of a 150-year war between the proponents of nature and of culture, a conflict that is showing no sign of abating. This battleground is the language of color.

  Why should color, of all things, be at the center of so much crossfire? Perhaps because in meddling with such a deep and seemingly instinctive area of perception, culture camouflages itself as nature more successfully there than in any other area of language. There is nothing remotely abstract, theoretical, philosophical, hypothetical, or any other -cal, so it seems, about the difference between yellow and red or between green and blue. And since colors are on the ground level of perception, the concepts of color would appear to be the prerogative of nature. And yet nature has been rather negligent in staking out her boundaries on the spectrum. The colors form a continuum: green does not become blue at any definite point, but blurs gradually into blue through millions of shades of teal, turquoise, and aquamarine (see figure 1). When we speak about colors, however, we impose distinct boundaries on this variegated swathe: “yellow,” “green,” “blue,” and so on. But is our particular way of dividing the color space a dictate of nature? Are the concepts “yellow” or “green” universal constants of the human race that were decreed by the biological makeup of the eye and brain? Or are they arbitrary cultural conventions? Could the boundaries have been set differently? And why should anyone dream up such abstruse hypothetical questions anyway?

  As it happens, the controversy over the concepts of color was not conjured up by any abstract philosophical ruminations but arose in the wake of entirely practical observations. A series of discoveries made in the middle of the nineteenth century led to the startling revelation that mankind’s relation to color has not always been as clear as it seems to us now, and that what appears obvious to us caused no end of difficulty to the ancients. The ensuing mission to discover the source of the “color sense” is a gripping Victorian adventure story, an episode in the history of ideas that can rival the derring-do of any nineteenth-century explorer. The color expedition reached the remotest corners of the earth, got tangled up with the fiercest controversies of the day—evolution, heredity, and race—and was driven by a motley cast of unlikely heroes: a celebrated statesman whose intellectual feats are now almost entirely unknown, an Orthodox Jew who was led by his philological discoveries to the most heterodox evolutionary thoughts, an eye doctor from a provincial German university who set a whole generation in pursuit of a bright red herring, and a Cambridge don, dubbed the “Galileo of anthropology,” who finally put the quest back on course, against his own better judgment.

  The nineteenth-century struggle to understand what it is that separates us from the ancients, the eye or the tongue, turned in the twentieth century into an all-out battle over the concepts of language, in which opposing worldviews were pitted against one another—universalism against relativism, and nativism against empiricism. In this world war of isms, the spectrum assumed totemic importance, as proponents of both nature and culture came to view their hold over color as decisive for the control over language in general. At different times, each side declared color as the trump card in their wider argument, and received opinion thus swung from one extreme to the other, from nature to culture, and in recent decades back to nature again.

  The vicissitudes of this controversy make color an ideal test case for adjudicating over nature’s and culture’s conflicting claims on the concepts of language. Or put another way: the seemingly narrow strip of color can serve as a litmus test for nothing less than the question of how deep the communalities are between the ways human beings express themselves, and how superficial the differences—or vice versa!

  The discussion so far may have given the impression that there is nothing more to language than a collection of concepts and their corresponding labels. But in order to communicate subtle thoughts involving intricate relations between different concepts, language needs much more than a list of concepts—it needs a grammar, a sophisticated system of rules for organizing concepts into coherent sentences. Able as as be coherent communicate concepts even example for for grammar in likes many not of one one ordering rules rules sentence the the the thoughts to with without without words would. (I mean: without the rules of grammar, for example without the rules for ordering words in the sentence, one would not be able to communicate coherent thoughts, even with as many concepts as one likes.) And as it happens, the debates between the advocates of nature and of nurture, between nativists and culturalists, universalists and relativists have raged just as fiercely over grammar as over the concepts of language. Are the rules of grammar—word order, syntactic structures, word structure, sound structure—encoded in our genes, or do they reflect cultural conventions?

  The dominant view among linguists today—advanced by Noam Chomsky and the influential research program that he has inspired—is that most of the grammar of language, that is to say, of all human languages, is innate. This school of thought, which is known as “nativist,” contends that the rules of universal grammar are coded in our DNA: humans are born with brains preequipped with a specific tool kit of complex grammatical structures, so that children do not need to learn these structures when they acquire their mother tongue. For the nativists, therefore, grammar reflects universal human nature, and any differences between the grammatical structures of different languages are superficial and of little consequence.

  According to the dissenting minority view, there is scant evidence to show that any specific rules of grammar are prewired in the brain and there is no need to invoke genes in order to account for grammatical structures, because these can be explained more simply and more plausibly as the product of cultural evolution and as a response to the exigencies of efficient communication. In The Unfolding of Language, I argued for this latter view, by showing how a sophisticated system of specific grammatical rules could have evolved from very humble beginnings, driven by forces of change that are motivated by broad traits of human nature, such as laziness (effort saving in pronunciation) and a need to impose order on the world.

  This book will not dwell on the grammatical side of the great nature-culture controversy, but there is one aspect of grammar that will need to come under the magnifying glass, because there the role of culture is especially and almost universally underappreciated. This aspect is complexity. Does the complexity of a language reflect the culture and society of its speakers, or is it a universal constant determined by human nature? If the subject of color was the most bitterly contested area in the debate over concepts, the question of complexity is undoubtedly the issue in the battle over grammar that has been least contested—but ought to be. For decades, linguists of all persuasions, both nativists and culturalists, have been trotting out the same party line: all languages are equally complex. But I will argue that this refrain is merely an empty slogan and that the evidence suggests that the complexity of some areas of grammar reflects the culture of the speakers, often in unexpected ways.

  LANGUAGE AS A LENS

  If the questions explored in the first part of the book have stirred up fierce debates and raging emotions, these are but storms in a teacup compared with the gales of discord that beset the subject
of the second part, the question of the mother tongue’s influence on our thoughts. Could language have more than a passive role as a reflection of cultural differences and be an active instrument of coercion through which culture imposes its conventions on our mind? Do different languages lead their speakers to different perceptions? Is our particular language a lens through which we view the world?

  At first sight, there seems to be nothing unreasonable about posing this question. Since culture has a great deal of leeway in defining concepts, it is—in principle—entirely sensible to ask whether our culture could affect our thoughts through the linguistic concepts it imposes. But while the question seems perfectly kosher in theory, in practice the mere whiff of the subject today makes most linguists, psychologists, and anthropologists recoil. The reason why the topic causes such intense embarrassment is that it carries with it a baggage of intellectual history which is so disgraceful that the mere suspicion of association with it can immediately brand anyone a fraud. The problem is that any influence of language on thought is very difficult to prove or disprove empirically, so that the subject has traditionally afforded a perfect platform to those who enjoy flashing their fantasies without the least danger of being caught out by the fact police. Like flies to the honeypot or philosophers to the unknowable, the most inspired charlatans, the most virtuoso con artists, not to mention hordes of run-of-the-mill crackpots, have been drawn to expostulate on the influence of the mother tongue on its speakers’ thoughts. The second part of the book starts with a short sample from this Decameron of excesses, and concentrates on the most notorious of the con men, Benjamin Lee Whorf, who seduced a whole generation into believing, without a shred of evidence, that American Indian languages lead their speakers to an entirely different conception of reality from ours.

  Today, partly because of this outrageous legacy, most respectable linguists and psychologists either categorically deny that the mother tongue can have any influence on speakers’ thoughts, or claim that any such influence is at best negligible, even trivial. Nevertheless, in recent years some intrepid researchers have attempted to apply sound scientific methods to this question, and the findings that have emerged from their research have already revealed surprising ways in which the idiosyncrasies of the mother tongue do after all affect the mind. The second part of the book presents three examples where such influence seems to me to have been demonstrated most plausibly. As the story unfolds, it will become evident that the credible influence of language on speakers’ thinking is of a radically different kind from what was touted in the past. Whorf’s muse floated in the loftiest levels of cognition, fantasizing about how languages could determine speakers’ capacity for logical reasoning and how speakers of such and such language would not be able to understand such and such an idea because their language does not make such and such a distinction. The effects that have emerged from recent research, however, are far more down to earth. They are to do with the habits of mind that language can instill on the ground level of thought: on memory, attention, perception, and associations. And while these effects may be less wild than those flaunted in the past, we shall see that some of them are no less striking for all that.

  But first—off to the fighting over the rainbow.

  PART I

  The LANGUAGE MIRROR

  1

  Naming the Rainbow

  London, 1858. On the first of July, the Linnean Society, in its magnificent new quarters at Burlington House in Piccadilly, will hear two papers by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace announcing jointly a theory of evolution by natural selection. Before long, the flame will flare up and illuminate the intellectual firmament, leaving no corner of human reason untouched. But although the wildfire of Darwinism will catch up with us soon enough, we do not begin quite there. Our story starts a few months earlier and a few streets away, in Westminster, with a rather improbable hero. At forty-nine, he is already an eminent politician, member of Parliament for Oxford University, and ex-chancellor of the Exchequer. But he is still ten years away from becoming prime minister, and even further from being celebrated as one of Britain’s greatest statesmen. In fact, the Right Honorable William Ewart Gladstone has been languishing on the opposition benches for the last three years. But his time has not been idly spent.

  While out of office, he has devoted his legendary energies to the realm of the mind, and in particular to his burning intellectual passion: that ancient bard who “founded for the race the sublime office of the poet, and who built upon his own foundations an edifice so lofty and so firm that it still towers unapproachably above the handiwork not only of common, but even of many uncommon men.” Homer’s epics are for Gladstone nothing less than “the most extraordinary phenomenon in the whole history of purely human culture.” The Iliad and the Odyssey have been his lifelong companions and his literary refuge ever since his Eton schooldays. But for Gladstone, a man of deep religious conviction, Homer’s poems are more than merely literature. They are his second Bible, a perfect compendium of human character and experience that displays human nature in the most admirable form it could assume without the aid of Christian revelation.

  Gladstone’s monumental oeuvre, his Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, has just been published this March. Its three stout, door-stopping tomes of well over seventeen hundred pages sweep across an encyclopedic range of topics, from the geography of the Odyssey to Homer’s sense of beauty, from the position of women in Homeric society to the moral character of Helen. One unassuming chapter, tucked away at the end of the last volume, is devoted to a curious and seemingly marginal theme, “Homer’s perception and use of color.” Gladstone’s scrutiny of the Iliad and the Odyssey revealed that there is something awry about Homer’s descriptions of color, and the conclusions Gladstone draws from his discovery are so radical and so bewildering that his contemporaries are entirely unable to digest them and largely dismiss them out of hand. But before long, Gladstone’s conundrum will launch a thousand ships of learning, have a profound effect on the development of at least three academic disciplines, and trigger a war over the control of language between nature and culture that after 150 years shows no sign of abating.

  Even in a period far less unaccustomed than ours to the concurrence of political power and greatness of mind, Gladstone’s Homeric scholarship was viewed as something out of the ordinary. He was, after all, an active politician, and yet his three-volume opus would have been no mean achievement as the lifetime’s work of a dedicated don. To some, especially political colleagues, Gladstone’s devotion to the classics was the cause of resentment. “You are so absorbed in questions about Homer and Greek words,” a party friend complained, “that you are not reading newspapers or feeling the pulse of followers.” But for the general public, Gladstone’s virtuoso Homerology was a subject of fascination and admiration. The Times ran a review of Gladstone’s book that was so long it had to be printed in two installments and would amount to more than thirty pages in this book’s type. Nor did Gladstone’s erudition fail to impress in intellectual circles. “There are few public men in Europe,” was one professor’s verdict, “so pure-minded, so quick-sighted, and so highly cultivated as Mr. Gladstone.” In the following years, books by distinguished academics in Britain and even on the Continent were dedicated to Gladstone, “the statesman, orator, and scholar,” “the untiring promoter of Homeric Studies.”

  William Ewart Gladstone, 1809–1898

  Of course, there was a but. While Gladstone’s prodigious learning, his mastery of the text, and his fertility of logical resources were universally praised, the reaction to many of his actual arguments was downright scathing. Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote that on the subject of Homer “most people think [Gladstone] a little hobby-horsical.” A professor of Greek at Edinburgh University explained to his students that “Mr. Gladstone may be a learned, enthusiastic, most ingenious and subtle expositor of Homer—always eloquent, and sometimes brilliant; but he is not sound. His logic is feeble, almost puerile
, his tactical movements, though full of graceful dash and brilliancy, are utterly destitute of sobriety, of caution, and even of common sense.” Karl Marx, himself an avid reader of Greek literature and not one to mince his words, wrote to Engels that Gladstone’s book was “characteristic of the inability of the English to produce anything valuable in Philology.” And the epic review in the Times (anonymous, as reviews were in those days) twists itself into the most convoluted of circumlocutions to avoid explicitly calling Gladstone a fool. It starts by declaring that “Mr. Gladstone is excessively clever. But, unfortunately for excessive cleverness, it affords one of the aptest illustrations of the truth of the proverb that extremes meet.” The review ends, nearly thirteen thousand words later, with the regret that “so much power should be without effect, that so much genius should be without balance, that so much fertility should be fertility of weeds, and that so much eloquence should be as the tinkling cymbal and the sounding brass.”