Before you rush to get rid of your psychiatrist and hire a grammarian instead, try this quick reality check. First, on a point of order, one should mention that no one fully understands the niceties of the biblical Hebrew verbal system. There are two main verbal forms in Hebrew, and the difference between them seems to depend on some elusive mix of both tense and what linguists call aspect—the distinction between completed actions (e.g., “I ate”) and ongoing actions (“I was eating”). But let’s even grant for the sake of argument that the Hebrew verb does not express the future tense, or any other tenses at all. Need this absence have any constraining effect on the speakers’ understanding of time, future, and eternity? Here is a verse from a delightful prophecy about impending doom, where a wrathful Jehovah promises his enemies imminent retribution:
Vengeance is mine, and recompense, at the time when their foot shall slip; for the day of their calamity is near, and the things to come hasten upon them.
(The Song of Moses, Deuteronomy 32:35)
There are two verbs in the Hebrew original, and as it happens, the first, “slip,” is in one of the two main verbal forms I have just mentioned, and the second, “hasten,” is in the other. In the English translation, these two verbs appear in two different tenses: “shall slip” and “hasten.” But while scholars can argue until vengeance comes home whether the difference between the Hebrew verbal forms expresses primarily aspect or tense, does any of this matter two hoots to the meaning of this verse? Would the meaning of the English translation change in any way if we changed the verb “slip” to the present tense: “at the time when their foot slips”? And can you detect any nebulousness about the concept of the future in the spine-chilling image of the things to come hastening upon the sinners?
Or think about it another way: when you ask someone, in perfect English prose and in the present tense, something like “are you coming tomorrow?” do you feel your grasp of the concept of futurity is slipping? Your idea of time changing in manifold reciprocity? The hope and resilience of your spirit and the fabric of your humanity beginning to fail? If Jeremiah were alive today, he might say (or do I mean “he might have said”?): Even the stork in the heavens knows her times. And the turtledove, the swallow, and crane keep the time of their coming. But My scholars know not the ordinance of the World.
You may feel you have heard enough about linguistic relativity by now, but let me treat you to one final bit of burlesque. In 1996, the American journal Philosophy Today featured an article entitled “Linguistic Relativity in French, English, and German Philosophy” in which the author, William Harvey, asserted that the grammar of French, English, and German can explain the differences between the three philosophical traditions. For example, “English philosophy being largely, according to our thesis, determined by English grammar, we should find it to be, like the language, a fusion of the French and the German.” The point is then proved by showing that English theology (Anglican) is a cross between (French) Catholicism and (German) Protestantism. There are further gems. German’s case system “is part of the explanation for German philosophy’s orientation toward system construction,” whereas “if English thought is in some ways more open to ambiguity and lack of system, it might be attributed in part to the relative variability and looseness of English syntax.”
It might. It might also be attributable to the irregular shape of hot cross buns. More appropriately, however, it should be attributed to the habit of English-language journals to allow the likes of Mr. Harvey free range. (Incidentally, I know that hot cross buns are not particularly irregular. But then again, neither is English syntax particularly “variable and loose.” It is more rigid in its word order, for instance, than German.)
THE PRISON-HOUSE OF LANGUAGE
By far the most famous claim that Nietzsche never made was: “We have to cease to think if we refuse to do so in the prison-house of language.” What he actually said was: “We cease to think if we do not want to do it under linguistic constraints” (Wir hören auf zu denken, wenn wir es nicht in dem sprachlichen Zwange thun wollen). But the English mistranslation has turned into a catchphrase, and as it happens, this phrase neatly summarizes everything that is so wrong about linguistic relativity. For there is one toxic fallacy that runs like quicksilver through all the arguments we have encountered so far, and this is the assumption that the language we happen to speak is a prison-house that limits the concepts we are able to understand. Whether it is the claim that the lack of a tense system constrains speakers’ understanding of time, or the allegation that when a verb and an object are fused together speakers do not understand the distinction between action and thing—what unites all these contentions is a premise that is as crude as it is false, namely that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” that the concepts expressed in a language are the same as the concepts its speakers are able to understand, and that the distinctions made in a grammar are the same as the distinctions the speakers are able to conceive.
It is barely comprehensible that such a ludicrous notion could have achieved such currency, given that so much contrary evidence screams in the face wherever one looks. Do ignorant folk who have never heard of “Schadenfreude” find it difficult to understand the concept of relishing someone else’s misfortune? Conversely, do Germans, whose language uses one and the same word for “when” and “if” (wenn), fail to understand the logical difference between what might happen under certain conditions and what will happen regardless? Did the ancient Babylonians, who used the same word (arnum) for both “crime” and “punishment,” not understand the difference? If so, why did they write thousands of legal documents, law codes, and court protocols to determine exactly what punishment should be given for what crime?
The list of examples could easily be extended. The Semitic languages require different verbal forms for the masculine and the feminine (“you eat” would have different forms depending on whether you are female or male), whereas English does not make gender distinctions on verbs. George Steiner concludes from this that “an entire anthropology of sexual equality is implicit in the fact that our verbs, in distinction from those of Semitic tongues, do not indicate the gender of the agent.” Really? There are some languages that are so sexually enlightened that they make no gender distinctions even on pronouns, so that even “he” and “she” are fused into one unisex plastic synthetic creation. Which languages might these be? Turkish, Indonesian, and Uzbek, to name a few examples—not exactly languages of societies renowned for their anthropology of sexual equality.
Of course, no list of such blunders could be complete without George Orwell’s novel 1984, where the political rulers have such faith in the power of language that they assume political dissent could be entirely eliminated if only all offending words could be expunged from the vocabulary. “In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” But why stop there? Why not abolish the word “greed” as a quick fix for the world’s economy, or do away with the word “pain” to save billions on aspirin, or confine the word “death” to the garbage can as an instant formula for universal immortality?
My ultimate aim, proclaimed earlier on, was to convince you that there might after all be something worth salvaging from the idea that our mother tongue can influence our thoughts and perceptions. This aim may now seem more like a suicide mission. But although the prospects for linguistic relativity do not look terribly promising right at the moment, the good news is that, having reached the intellectual nadir, things can only look up from here. In fact, the bankruptcy of Whorfianism has been beneficial for the progress of science, because by setting such an appalling example it has exposed the two cardinal errors that any responsible theory about the influence of language on thought must avoid. First, Whorf’s addiction to fantasies unfettered by facts has taught us that any alleged influence of a language on speakers’ minds must be demonstrated, not just assumed. One cannot just say “language X doe
s things differently from language Y, and hence speakers of X must think differently from speakers of Y.” If there are reasons to suspect that speakers of X might think differently from speakers of Y, this has to be shown empirically. In fact, even that is not quite enough, since when differences in thought patterns can be demonstrated, a convincing case still has to be made that it was really language that caused these differences, rather than other factors in the speakers’ cultures and environments.
The second major lesson from the errors of Whorfianism is that we must escape from the prison-house of language. Or rather, what we must escape from is the delusion that language is a prison-house for thought—that it constrains its speakers’ ability to reason logically and prevents them from understanding ideas that are used by speakers of other languages.
Of course, when I say that a language does not prevent its speakers from understanding any concepts, I do not mean that one can talk about any subject in any language in its current state. Try to translate a dishwasher operating manual into the language of a tribe from the Papuan highlands, and you will get stuck fairly quickly, since there are no words for forks, or plates, or glasses, or buttons, or soap, or rinsing programs, or flashing fault indicators. But it’s not the deep nature of the language that prevents the Papuans from understanding such concepts; it’s simply the fact that they are not acquainted with the relevant cultural artifacts. Given enough time, you could perfectly well explain all these things to them in their mother tongue.
Likewise, try to translate an introduction to metaphysics or to algebraic topology or, for that matter, many passages of the New Testament into our Papuan language, and you are unlikely to get very far, because you will not have words equivalent to most of the abstract concepts that are required. But again, you could create the vocabulary for such abstract concepts in any language, either by borrowing it or by extending the use of existing words to abstract senses. (European languages used both strategies.) These brave claims about the theoretical possibility of expressing complex ideas in any language are not merely wishful thinking; they have been proved countless times in practice. Admittedly, the experiment has not been conducted so often with dishwasher manuals or with metaphysics textbooks, but it has been conducted very often with the New Testament, which contains theological and philosophical arguments on extremely high levels of abstraction.
And if you are still tempted by the theory that the inventory of ready-made concepts in our mother tongue determines the concepts we are able to understand, then just ask yourself how one would ever manage to learn any new concepts if that theory were true. Take this example. If you are not a professional linguist, the word “factivity” will probably not be part of your language. But does this mean that your mother tongue (ordinary English, that is) precludes you from understanding the distinction between “factive” and “non-factive” verbs? Let’s see. The verbs “realize” and “know,” for example, are called “factive,” because if you say something like “Alice realized that her friends had left,” you are implying that what Alice realized was a true fact. (So it would be very odd to say “Alice realized that her friends had left, but in fact they hadn’t.”) On the other hand, non-factive verbs such as “assume” do not imply a true fact: when you say “Alice assumed that her friends had left,” you can continue equally naturally with either “and indeed they had” or “but in fact they hadn’t.” So there we are. I have just explained a new and highly abstract concept to you, factivity, that was not part of your language before. Was your mother tongue a barrier?
Since there is no evidence that any language forbids its speakers from thinking anything, as Humboldt himself recognized two hundred years ago, the effects of the mother tongue cannot be sought in what different languages allow their speakers to think. But where then? Humboldt went on to say, in somewhat mystical terms, that languages nevertheless differ in what they “encourage and stimulate to do from their own inner force.” He seems to have had the right sort of intuition, but he was clearly struggling to pin it down and never managed to get beyond the metaphors. Can we turn his hazy imagery into something more transparent?
I believe we can. But to do so, we need to abandon the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the assumption that languages limit their speakers’ ability to express or understand concepts, and turn instead to a fundamental insight that can be dubbed the Boas-Jakobson principle.
FROM SAPIR-WHORF TO BOAS-JAKOBSON
We have already encountered the anthropologist Franz Boas as the person who introduced Edward Sapir to the study of Native American languages. In 1938, Boas made an acute observation about the role of grammar in language. He wrote that, in addition to determining the relationship between the words in a sentence, “grammar performs another important function. It determines those aspects of each experience that must be expressed.” And he went on to explain that such obligatory aspects vary greatly between languages. Boas’s observation was rather inconspicuously placed in a little section about “grammar” within a chapter entitled “Language” within an introduction to General Anthropology, and its significance does not seem to have been fully appreciated until two decades later, when the Russian-American linguist Roman Jakobson encapsulated Boas’s insight into a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” The crucial differences between languages, in other words, are not in what each language allows its speakers to express—for in theory any language could express anything—but in what information each language obliges it speakers to express.
Franz Boas, 1858–1942
Roman Jakobson, 1896–1982
Jakobson gives the following example. If I say in English, “I spent yesterday evening with a neighbor,” you may well wonder whether my companion was male or female, but I have the right to tell you politely that it’s none of your business. But if we are speaking French or German or Russian, I don’t have the privilege to equivocate, because I am obliged by the language to choose between voisin or voisine, Nachbar or Nachbarin, sosed or sosedka. So French, German, and Russian would compel me to inform you about the sex of my companion whether or not I felt it was your business. This does not mean, of course, that English speakers are oblivious to the differences between evenings spent with male or female neighbors. Nor does it mean that English speakers cannot express the distinction should they want to. It only means that English speakers are not obliged to specify the sex each time the neighbor is mentioned, while speakers of some languages are.
On the other hand, English does oblige you to specify certain bits of information that can be left to the context in some other languages. If I want to tell you in English about a dinner with my neighbor, I may not have to tell you the neighbor’s sex, but I do have to tell you something about the timing of the event: I have to decide whether we dined, have been dining, are dining, will be dining, and so on. Chinese, on the other hand, does not oblige its speakers to specify the exact time of the action each time they use a verb, because the same verbal form can be used for past or present or future actions. Again, this does not mean that Chinese speakers are unable to express the time of the action if they think it is particularly relevant. But as opposed to English speakers, they are not obliged to do so every time.
Neither Boas nor Jakobson was highlighting such grammatical differences in relation to the influence of language on the mind. Boas was concerned primarily with the role that grammar plays in language, and Jakobson was dealing with the challenges that such differences pose for translation. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the Boas-Jakobson principle is the key to unlocking the actual effects of a particular language on thought. If different languages influence their speakers’ minds in varying ways, this is not because of what each language allows people to think but rather because of the kinds of information each language habitually obliges people to think about. When a language forces its speakers to pay attention to certain aspects of the world each time they open their mouths or prick
up their ears, such habits of speech can eventually settle into habits of mind with consequences for memory, or perception, or associations, or even practical skills.
If this all still sounds a little too abstract, then the contrast between the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and the Boas-Jakobson principle can be brought into focus with another example. Chinese may seem to us rather lax in allowing its speakers to equivocate about the time of the action, but just try to imagine what a speaker of Matses from Peru might feel upon hearing about the incredibly crude and careless tense distinctions of English.
The Matses are a 2,500-strong tribe, and they live in the tropical rain forest along the Javari River, a tributary of the Amazon. Their language, which was recently described by the linguist David Fleck, compels them to make distinctions of mind-blowing subtlety whenever they report events. To start with, there are three degrees of pastness in Matses: you cannot just say that someone “passed by there”; you have to specify with different verbal endings whether this action took place in the recent past (roughly up to a month), distant past (roughly from a month to fifty years), or remote past (more than fifty years ago). In addition, the verb has a system of distinctions that linguists call “evidentiality,” and as it happens, the Matses system of evidentiality is the most elaborate that has ever been reported for any language. Whenever Matses speakers use a verb, they are obliged to specify—like the finickiest of lawyers—exactly how they came to know about the facts they are reporting. The Matses, in other words, have to be master epistemologists. There are separate verbal forms depending on whether you are reporting direct experience (you saw someone passing by with your own eyes), something inferred from evidence (you saw footprints on the sand), conjecture (people always pass by at that time of day), or hearsay (your neighbor told you he had seen someone passing by). If a statement is reported with the incorrect evidentiality form, it is considered a lie. So if, for instance, you ask a Matses man how many wives he has, unless he can actually see his wives at that very moment, he would answer in the past tense and would say something like daëd ikoh: “two there were [directly experienced recently].” In effect, what he would be saying is, “There were two last time I checked.” After all, given that the wives are not present, he cannot be absolutely certain that one of them hasn’t died or run off with another man since he last saw them, even if this was only five minutes ago. So he cannot report it as a certain fact in the present tense.
Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages Page 17
