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

by Guy Deutscher

  A seductive idea was thus tossed into the air, an idea that in the 1930s would be taken up (and up and up) at Yale. Humboldt himself never went as far as alleging that our mother tongue can entirely constrain our thoughts and intellectual horizons. He explicitly acknowledged something that in the hullaballoo around Whorf a century later tended to be overlooked, namely that, in principle, any thought can be expressed in any language. The real differences between languages, he argued, are not in what a language is able to express but rather in “what it encourages and stimulates its speakers to do from its own inner force.”

  What exactly this “inner force” is, what ideas precisely it “stimulates” speakers to formulate, and how in practical terms it might do so always remained rather elusive in Humboldt’s writings. As we’ll see, his basic intuition may have been sound, but despite the detailed knowledge that he amassed about many exotic languages, his statements on the subject of the mother tongue’s influence on the mind always remained in the higher stratosphere of philosophical generalities and never really got down to the nitty-gritty of detail.

  In fact, in his voluminous musings on this subject, Humboldt abided by the first two commandments for any great thinker: (1) Thou shalt be vague, (2) Thou shalt not eschew self-contradiction. But it may have been exactly this vagueness that struck a chord with his contemporaries. Following Humboldt’s lead, it now became fashionable among the great and the good to pay tribute to language’s influence on thought, and as long as one didn’t feel the urge to provide any particular examples, one could freely indulge in resonant but ultimately hollow imagery. The renowned Oxford professor of philology Max Müller declared in 1873 that “the words in which we think are channels of thought which we have not dug ourselves, but which we found ready made for us.” And his nemesis across the Atlantic, the American linguist William Whitney, may have concurred with Müller in nothing else but agreed nevertheless that “every single language has its own peculiar framework of established distinctions, its shapes and forms of thought, into which, for the human being who learns that language as his mother-tongue, is cast the content and product of his mind, his store of impressions, . . . his experience and knowledge of the world.” The mathematician and philosopher William Kingdon Clifford added a few years later that “it is the thought of past humanity imbedded in our language which makes Nature to be what she is for us.”

  Throughout the nineteenth century, however, such statements remained on the level of occasional rhetorical flourishes. It was only in the twentieth century that the slogans began to be distilled into specific claims about the alleged influence of particular grammatical phenomena on the mind. The Humboldtian ideas now underwent a rapid process of fermentation, and as the spirit of the new theory grew more powerful, the rhetoric became less sober.

  LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY

  What was it in the air that catalyzed this reaction? One reason must have been the great (and wholly justified) excitement about the enormous advances that linguists were making in understanding the outlandish nature of Amerindian languages. Linguists in America did not need to pore over manuscripts from the Vatican library to unearth the structure of the native languages of the continent, as there were still dozens of living native languages to be studied in situ. What is more, in the century that separated Sapir from Humboldt, the science of language had experienced a meteoric rise in sophistication, and the analytic tools at linguists’ disposal became incomparably more powerful. When these advanced tools began to be applied in earnest to the treasure hoard of Native American languages, they revealed grammatical landscapes that Humboldt could not have dreamed of.

  Edward Sapir, like Humboldt a century before him, started his linguistic career far from the open vistas of American languages. His studies at Columbia concentrated on Germanic philology and consisted of things rather reminiscent of the pedantic collections of obscure verbal forms in ancient tongues that he derided in the passage I quoted earlier. Sapir credited his conversion from the dusty armchair of Germanic philology to the great outdoors of Indian languages to the influence of Franz Boas, the charismatic professor of anthropology at Columbia who was also the pioneer in the scientific study of the native languages of the continent. Years later, Sapir reminisced about a life-changing meeting at which Boas summoned counterexamples from this, that, or the other Indian tongue to every generalization about the structure of language that Sapir had previously believed in. Sapir began to feel that Germanic philology had taught him very little and that he still had “everything to learn about language.” Henceforth, he was to apply his legendary sharpness of mind to the study of Chinook, Navajo, Nootka, Yana, Tlingit, Sarcee, Kutchin, Ingalik, Hupa, Paiute, and other native languages, producing analyses of unmatched clarity and depth.

  In addition to the exhilaration of discovering weird and exotic grammars, there was something else in the air that pushed Sapir toward the formulation of his linguistic relativity principle. This was the radical trend in the philosophy of the early twentieth century. At the time, philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein were busy decrying the pernicious influences of language on the metaphysics of the past. Russell wrote in 1924: “Language misleads us both by its vocabulary and by its syntax. We must be on our guard in both respects if our logic is not to lead to a false metaphysic.”

  Edward Sapir, 1884–1939

  Sapir translated the claims about language’s influence on philosophical ideas into an argument about the influence of the mother tongue on everyday thoughts and perceptions. He started talking about the “tyrannical hold that linguistic form has upon our orientation in the world,” and as opposed to anyone before him, he went on to inject such slogans with actual content. In 1931 he advanced the following example for how one specific linguistic difference should affect speakers’ thoughts. When we observe a stone moving through space toward the earth, Sapir explained, we involuntarily divide this event into two separate concepts: a stone and the action of falling, and we declare that “the stone falls.” We assume that this is the only way to describe such an event. But the inevitability of the division into “stone” and “fall” is just an illusion, because the Nootka language, which is spoken on Vancouver Island, does things in a very different way. There is no verb in Nootka that corresponds to our general verb “fall” and that can describe the action independently of a specific falling object. Instead, a special verb, “to stone,” is used to refer to the motion of a stone in particular. To describe the event of a stone falling, this verb is combined with the element “down.” So the state of affairs that we break up into “stone” and “fall” is described in Nootka as something like “[it] stones down.”

  Such concrete examples of “incommensurable analysis of experience in different languages,” Sapir says, “make very real to us a kind of relativity that is generally hidden from us by our naïve acceptance of fixed habits of speech. . . . This is the relativity of concepts or, as it might be called, the relativity of the form of thought.” This type of relativity, he adds, may be easier to grasp than Einstein’s, but to understand it one needs the comparative data of linguistics.

  Unfortunately for Sapir, it is exactly by forsaking the cozy vagueness of philosophical slogans and venturing into the freezing drafts of specific linguistic examples that he exposes the thin ice on which his theory stands. The Nootka expression “it stones down” is undoubtedly a very different way of describing the event, and it certainly sounds strange, but does this strangeness mean that Nootka speakers necessarily have to perceive the event in a different way? Does the fusion of verb and noun in Nootka necessarily imply that Nootka speakers do not have separate images of the action and the object in their minds?

  We can test this if we apply Sapir’s argument to a slightly more familiar language. Take the English phrase “it rains.” This construction is actually quite similar to the Nootka “it stones down,” because the action (falling) and the object (water drops) are combined into one verbal concept. But
not all languages do it in this way. In my mother tongue, the object and the action are kept apart, and one says something like “rain falls.” So there is a profound difference in the way our languages express the event of raining, but does this mean that you and I have to experience rain in a different way? Do you feel you are prevented by the grammar of your mother tongue from understanding the distinction between the watery substance and the action of falling? Do you find it hard to relate the falling raindrops to other things that fall down? Or are the differences in the way our languages express the idea of “raining” no more than merely differences in grammatical organization?

  At the time, no one thought of stumbling over such molehills. The excitement about the—largely factual—strangeness of expression in American Indian languages was somehow taken as sufficient to deduce the—largely fictional—differences in their speakers’ perceptions and thoughts. In fact, the party was just beginning, for onto the stage now steps Sapir’s most creative student, Benjamin Lee Whorf.

  Whereas Sapir still kept a few toes on the ground and on the whole was reluctant to spell out the exact form of the alleged tyrannical hold of linguistic categories on the mind, his student Whorf suffered no such qualms. Whorf was to boldly go where no man had gone before, and in a series of ever wilder claims he expounded the power of our mother tongue to influence not just our thoughts and perceptions but even the physics of the cosmos. The grammar of each language, he wrote, “is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas, but rather is itself the shaper of ideas, the program and guide for the individual’s mental activity, for his analysis of impressions. . . . We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages.”

  The general structure of Whorf’s arguments was to mention an outlandish grammatical feature and then, with a fateful “hence,” “so,” or “therefore,” to conclude that this feature must result in a very different way of thinking. From the frequent fusion of noun and verb in American Indian languages, for example, Whorf concluded that such languages impose a “monistic view of nature” rather than our “bipolar division of nature.” Here is how he justifies such claims: “Some languages have means of expression in which the separate terms are not so separate as in English but flow together into plastic synthetic creations. Hence such languages, which do not paint the separate-object picture of the universe to the same degree as English and its sister tongues, point toward possible new types of logic and possible new cosmical pictures.”

  If you find yourself getting swept away by the prose, just remember the English phrase “it rains,” which combines the raindrops and the action of falling into one “plastic synthetic creation.” Is your “separate-object picture of the universe” affected? Do you and speakers of “rain falls” languages operate under a different type of logic and different cosmical pictures?

  HOPI TIME

  What surprises most is to find that various grand generalizations of the Western world, such as time, velocity and matter, are not essential to the construction of a consistent picture of the universe.

  (Benjamin Lee Whorf, Science and Linguistics)

  Even the stork in the heavens knows her times. And the turtledove, the swallow, and crane keep the time of their coming. But My people know not the ordinance of the Lord.

  (Jeremiah 8:7)

  By far the most electrifying of Whorf’s arguments concerned a different area of grammar and a different language: Hopi from northeastern Arizona. Today the Hopi number about six thousand and are known especially for the “snake dance,” in which the performers dance with live snakes between their teeth. The snakes are then released and spread the word among their peers that the Hopi are in harmony with the spiritual and natural world. But Whorf made Hopi famous for a different reason: the Hopi language, he said, had no concept of time. Whorf claimed to have made a “long and careful study” of the Hopi language, although he never actually got round to visiting them in Arizona and his research was exclusively based on his conversations with one Hopi informant who lived in New York City. At the start of his investigations, Whorf argued that Hopi time “has zero dimensions; i.e., it cannot be given a number greater than one. The Hopi do not say, ‘I stayed five days,’ but ‘I left on the fifth day.’ A word referring to this kind of time, like the word day, can have no plural.” From this fact he concluded that “to us, for whom time is a motion on a space, unvarying repetition seems to scatter its force along a row of units of that space, and be wasted. To the Hopi, for whom time is not a motion but a ‘getting later’ of everything that has ever been done, unvarying repetition is not wasted but accumulated.” Whorf thus found it “gratuitous to assume that a Hopi who knows only the Hopi language and the cultural ideas of his own society has the same notions . . . of time and space that we have.” The Hopi, he said, would not understand our idiom “tomorrow is another day,” because for them the return of the day is “felt as the return of the same person, a little older but with all the impresses of yesterday, not as ‘another day,’ i.e. like an entirely different person.”

  But this was only the beginning. As his investigations of Hopi deepened, Whorf decided that his previous analysis had not gone far enough and that the Hopi language in fact contains no reference to time at all. Hopi, he explained, contains “no words, grammatical forms, constructions or expressions that refer directly to what we call ‘time,’ or to past, present, or future.” Thus a Hopi “has no general notion or intuition of TIME as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at an equal rate.”

  This spectacular revelation outshone anything that anyone had previously been able to imagine, and it shot Whorf to the attention of the world. The fame of his claims quickly spread far beyond linguistics, and within a few years Whorf’s ideas were in every mouth. Needless to say, the stakes were raised with each retelling. A 1958 book called Some Things Worth Knowing: A Generalist’s Guide to Useful Knowledge reported that the English language makes it impossible for “us laymen” to understand the scientific concept of time as a fourth dimension. But “a Hopi Indian, thinking in the Hopi language—which does not treat time as a flow—has less trouble with the fourth dimension than do we.” A few years later, one anthropologist explained that for the Hopi “time seems to be that aspect of being which is the knife-edge of now as it is in the process of becoming both ‘past’ and ‘future.’ Viewed thus, we have no present either, but our linguistic habits make us feel as if we had.”

  There was only one hitch. In 1983, the linguist Ekkehart Malotki, who did extensive fieldwork on the Hopi language, wrote a book called Hopi Time. The first page of the book is largely blank, with only two short sentences printed in the middle, one below the other:

  After long and careful study and analysis, the Hopi language is seen to contain no words, grammatical forms, constructions, or expressions that refer directly to what we call “time.”

  (Benjamin Lee Whorf, “An American Indian Model of the Universe,” 1936)

  pu’ antsa pay qavongvaqw pay su’its talavay kuyvansat, pàasatham pu’ pam piw maanat taatayna

  Then indeed, the following day, quite early in the morning at the hour when people pray to the sun, around that time then, he woke up the girl again

  (Ekkehart Malotki, Hopi Field Notes, 1980)

  Malotki’s book goes on to describe, in 677 pages of small print, the numerous expressions for time in the Hopi language, as well as the tense and aspect system on its “timeless verbs.” Incredible how much a language can change in forty years.

  It is not difficult to comprehend why the principle of linguistic relativity, or the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,” as it has also come to be known, has sunk into such disrepute among respectable linguists. But there are others—philosophers, theologians, literary critics—who carry the torch regardless. One idea has proved particularly resilient to the onslaught of fact or reason: the argument that the tense system of a language determines the speakers’ understanding of time. Biblical Hebrew has off
ered particularly rich picking, as its allegedly tenseless verbal system could be relied on to explain anything from the Israelites’ conception of time to the nature of Judeo-Christian prophecy. In his 1975 cult book After Babel, George Steiner follows a long line of great thinkers in attempting to “relate grammatical possibilities and constraints to the development of such primary ontological concepts as time and eternity.” While always careful to avoid any formulation that could be nailed to a specific sense, Steiner nevertheless informs us that “much of the distinctive Western apprehension of time as a linear sequence and vectorial motion is set out in and organized by the Indo-European verb system.” But biblical Hebrew, according to Steiner, never developed such tense distinctions at all. Is this difference between the elaborate tense system of the Indo-European Greek and the tenselessness of Hebrew, he asks, responsible for the “contrasting evolution of Greek and Hebrew thought”? Or does it merely reflect preexisting thought patterns? “Is the convention that spoken facts are strictly contemporaneous with the presentness of the speaker—a convention which is crucial to Hebraic-Christian doctrines of revelation—a generator or a consequence of grammatical form?” Steiner concludes that the influence must go in both directions: the verbal system influences thought, which in turn influences the verbal system, all in “manifold reciprocity.”

  Above all, Steiner argues, it is the future tense that has momentous consequences for the human soul and mind, as it shapes our concept of time and rationality, even the very essence of our humanity. “We can be defined as the mammal that uses the future of the verb ‘to be,’ ” he explains. The future tense is what gives us hope for the future, and without it we are all condemned to end “in Hell, that is to say, in a grammar without futures.”