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

by Guy Deutscher

  But finding the right verbal form for directly experienced events is child’s play compared with the hairsplitting precision required when you report an event that has only been inferred. Here, Matses obliges you to specify not just how long ago you assume the event occurred but also how long ago you made the inference. Suppose you saw wild pigs’ footprints on the ground somewhere outside the village, and you want to tell your friends that the animals passed by at that place. In English, saying “wild pigs passed by there” is exactly as much information as you have to specify. But in Matses, you have to reveal both how long ago you found out about the event (that is, how long ago you saw the footprints) and how long before that you think the event itself (pigs passing by) actually occurred. For example, if a short time ago you discovered tracks that were still fresh, you assume that the wild pigs passed by only shortly before you saw the tracks, so you would have to say:

  kuen–ak–o–h

  passed by–HAPPENED SHORTLY BEFORE EXPERIENCED–EXPERIENCED RECENTLY–they

  “they passed by” (I found out a short time ago, it had happened shortly before that)

  If a short time ago you discovered tracks that were already old, you would have to say:

  kuen–nëdak–o–h

  passed by–HAPPENED LONG BEFORE EXPERIENCED–EXPERIENCED RECENTLY–they

  “they passed by” (I found out a short time ago, it had happened long before that)

  If a long time ago you discovered tracks that were still fresh, you would have to say:

  kuen–ak–onda–h

  passed by–HAPPENED SHORTLY BEFORE EXPERIENCED–EXPERIENCED LONG AGO–they

  “they passed by” (I found out long ago, it had happened shortly before that)

  And if a long time ago you discovered old tracks:

  kuen–nëdak–onda–h

  passed by–HAPPENED LONG BEFORE EXPERIENCED–EXPERIENCED LONG AGO–they

  “they passed by” (I found out long ago, it had happened long before that)

  The Matses system is outlandish by any stretch of the imagination, and nothing quite as elaborate has yet been found elsewhere. Matses shows just how fundamentally languages can vary in the kinds of information they oblige their speakers to convey. But the weirdness of Matses also helps to clarify exactly where credible influences of language on thought may and may not be sought. One shudders to think what Whorf would have made of the Matses language if information about it had fallen into his hands, or, for that matter, what a Whorfian among the Matses would make of the unfathomable vagueness of English verbs. “I find it gratuitous to assume,” such a Matses sage would say, “that an American who knows only the English language and the cultural ideas of his own society can have a proper grasp of epistemology. English speakers simply would not be able to understand the difference between directly experienced events and merely inferred facts, because their language imposes on them a monistic view of the universe that blends the event with how it was experienced into one plastic synthetic creation.”

  But this is gobbledygook, because we have no problems understanding the Matses distinctions, and if we are so minded we can easily express them in English: “I saw with my own eyes a short time ago that . . . ,” “I inferred a long time ago that . . . ,” “I guessed a very long time ago that . . . ,” and so on. When this kind of information is felt to be particularly relevant, for instance in the witness box, English speakers routinely use such expressions. The only real difference between English and Matses, therefore, is that Matses forces its speakers to supply all this information whenever they describe an event, whereas English does not.

  Whether the requirement to specify evidentiality translates into habits of mind that affect more than language is something that no one has yet studied empirically. But all the credible claims from recent years about the influence of a particular language on thought run on similar lines. No one (in his or her right mind) would argue nowadays that the structure of a language limits its speakers’ understanding to those concepts and distinctions that happen to be already part of the linguistic system. Rather, serious researchers have looked for the consequences of the habitual use from an early age of certain ways of expression. For example, does the need to pay constant attention to certain aspects of experience train speakers to be especially sensitive to certain details or induce particular types of memory patterns and associations? These are exactly the questions we shall explore in the next chapters.

  For some critics, such as Steven Pinker, the fact that our mother tongue constrains neither our capacity to reason logically nor our ability to understand complex ideas is an irredeemable anticlimax. In his recent book, The Stuff of Thought, Pinker argues that since no one has ever managed to show that speakers of one language find it impossible, or even extremely difficult, to reason in a particular way that comes naturally to the speakers of another language, then any remaining effects of language on thought are mundane, unsexy, boring, even trivial. Obviously, what’s sexy is a matter of personal taste. But in what follows, I hope to show that while the actual effects of language on thought are very different from the wild and woolly claims of the past, they are far from boring, mundane, or trivial.

  7

  Where the Sun

  Doesn’t Rise in the East

  DRESSED FOR DINNER

  The Guugu Yimithirr language has one famous claim to fame, and is consequently celebrated throughout the wide world of trivial pursuits. The story runs roughly like this. In July 1770, Captain Cook’s Endeavour was grounded off the northeastern coast of Australia, near the mouth of a river soon to be named Endeavour, in a place that was later to become Cooktown. During the weeks when the ship was being repaired, Captain Cook and his crew made contact with the native population of the continent, both human and marsupial. With the former, relations were at first rather cordial. Cook writes in his diary on July 10, 1770: “In the A.M. four of the Natives came down to the Sandy point on the North side of the Harbour, having along with them a small wooden Canoe with Outriggers, in which they seem’d to be employed striking fish. They were wholy naked, their Skins the Colour of Wood soot. Their Hair was black, lank, and cropt short, and neither wooly nor Frizled. Some part of their Bodys had been painted with red, and one of them had his upper lip and breast painted with Streakes of white. Their features were far from being disagreeable; their Voices were soft and Tunable.”

  The other natives were treated with somewhat less respect. In the Account of the Voyages, which was based on the diaries of Cook and his officers, we read the following description for what unfolded later that week: “Mr. Gore, who went out this day with his gun, had the good fortune to kill one of the animals which had been so much the subject of our speculation. . . . The head, neck, and shoulders, are very small in proportion to the other parts of the body; the tail is nearly as long as the body, thick near the rump, and tapering towards the end: the fore-legs of this individual were only eight inches long, and the hind-legs two and twenty: its progress is by successive leaps or hops, of a great length, in an erect posture; the skin is covered with a short fur, of a dark mouse or grey colour, excepting the head and ears, which bear a slight resemblance to those of a hare. This animal is called by the natives Kanguroo. The next day, our Kanguroo was dressed for dinner, and proved most excellent meat.”

  The Endeavour returned to England the following year with the skins of two kangaroos, and the animal painter George Stubbs was commissioned to do a likeness. Stubbs’s kangaroo immediately caught the public’s imagination, and the animal shot into celebrity. Eighteen years later, the excitement reached fever pitch when the first living specimen, “the wonderful Kanguroo from Botany Bay,” arrived in London and was displayed in the Haymarket. English thus gained its first word of Australian aboriginal origin, and as the fame of the animal spread to other countries, “kangaroo” became the most prominent feature of international vocabulary that was exported by a native language of Australia.

  Or was it?

 
While the kangaroo’s enduring popularity in the Old World was not a matter for doubt, the authenticity of the word’s roots in Australia soon came under suspicion. For when later Australian explorers spotted the animal in other parts of the continent, the local Aborigines never came up with anything remotely similar to “kangaroo.” Natives the length and breadth of Australia didn’t even recognize the word, and some of them actually assumed they were being taught the English name for the animal when they heard it. Since many different native languages were spoken across the continent, the fact that the Aborigines in other parts of Australia did not recognize the word was not, in itself, so suspicious. But most damaging to the credibility of “kangaroo” was the report of another explorer, Captain Philip Parker King, who visited the mouth of the very same Endeavour River in 1820, fifty years after Cook had left. When Captain King asked the Aborigines he met there what the animal was called, he was given a completely different name from what Cook had recorded. King transcribed the name in his own diary as “minnar” or “meenuah.”

  George Stubbs’s The Kongouro from New Holland, 1772

  So who were those natives with voices soft and tunable who had given Cook the word “kanguroo” in 1770, and what was their language? Or had Cook simply been duped? By the mid-nineteenth century, skepticism about the authenticity of the word was rife. In 1850, John Crawfurd, a distinguished Orientalist and Stamford Raffles’s successor as the resident of Singapore, wrote in the Journal of the Indian Archipelago and Eastern Asia that “it is very remarkable that this word, supposed to be Australian, is not to be found as the name of this singular marsupial animal in any language of Australia. Cook and his companions, therefore, when they gave it this name, must have made some mistake, but of what nature cannot be conjectured.” Myths and legends of all kinds soon spread. The most famous version, beloved of comedians unto this day, is that “kangaroo” was the phrase for “I don’t understand,” the answer allegedly given by the bemused natives to Cook’s question “What is this animal called?”

  More responsible lexicographers elected to remain cautious, and the Oxford English Dictionary hedges with appropriate elegance in the following definition, which—at the time I’m writing—still appears in the online edition: “Kangaroo: stated to have been the name in a native Australian language. Cook and Banks believed it to be the name given to the animal by the natives at Endeavour River, Queensland.”

  The mystery from Down Under was eventually resolved in 1971, when the anthropologist John Haviland began an intensive study of Guugu Yimithirr, a language spoken by an aboriginal community of about a thousand people who these days live some thirty miles north of Cooktown, but who previously occupied the territory near the Endeavour River. Haviland found that there is one particular type of large gray kangaroo whose name in Guugu Yimithirr is gangurru. The paternity of the name could thus no longer be in doubt. But if so, why wasn’t Captain King given the same name by the speakers of the same language when he visited in 1820? As it happens, the large gray gangurru that Cook’s party spotted is only rarely seen near the coast, so King probably pointed at a different type of kangaroo, which has a different name in Guugu Yimithirr. But we will never know which type of kangaroo it was that King saw, because the word he recorded, “minnar” or “meenuah,” was no doubt minha, the general term that means “meat” or “edible animal.”

  So Captain Cook was not duped. His linguistic observations are now rehabilitated, and in consequence, Guugu Yimithirr, the language that bequeathed to international vocabulary its most famous aboriginal icon, has won a place in the hearts and minds of trivia addicts all over the world.

  EGOCENTRIC AND GEOGRAPHIC COORDINATES

  “Then would you read a Sustaining Book, such as would help

  and comfort a Wedged Bear in Great Tightness?” So for a

  week Christopher Robin read that sort of book at the North

  end of Pooh, and Rabbit hung his washing on the South end.

  (“Pooh Goes Visiting and Pooh and Piglet Nearly Catch a Woozle”)

  There is an even better reason why Guugu Yimithirr deserves to be famous, but this reason is unknown even to the most avid trainspotters and is confined to the circles of professional linguists and anthropologists. The name of the language Guugu Yimithirr means something like “this kind of language” or “speaking this way” (guugu is “language,” and yimi-thirr means “this way”), and this name is rather apt since Guugu Yimithirr has a manner of talking about spatial relations that is decidedly out of this way. Its method of describing the arrangements of objects in space sounds almost incredibly odd to us, and when these peculiarities in Guugu Yimithirr were uncovered they inspired a large-scale research project into the language of space. The findings from this research have led to a fundamental revision of what had been assumed to be universal properties of human language, and have also supplied the most striking example so far of how our mother tongue can affect the way we think.

  Suppose you want to give someone driving directions for getting to your house. You might say something like: “Just after the traffic lights, take the first left and continue until you see the supermarket on your left, then turn right and drive to the end of the road, where you’ll see a white house right in front of you. Our door is the one on the right.” You could, in theory, also say the following: “Just to the east of the traffic lights, drive north and continue until you see a supermarket in the west. Then drive east, and at the end of the road you’ll see a white house directly to the east. Ours is the southern door.” These two sets of directions are equivalent in the sense that they describe the same route, but they rely on different systems of coordinates. The first system uses egocentric coordinates, whose two axes depend on our own body: a left-right axis and a front-back axis orthogonal to it. This coordinate system moves around with us wherever we turn. The axes always shift together with our field of vision, so that what is in the front becomes behind if we turn around, what was on our right is now on the left. The second system of coordinates uses fixed geographic directions, which are based on the compass directions North, South, East, and West. These directions do not change with your movements—what is to your north remains exactly to your north no matter how often you twist and turn.

  Of course, the egocentric and geographic systems do not exhaust the possibilities of talking about space and giving spatial directions. One could, for example, just point at a particular direction and say “go that way.” But for simplicity, let’s concentrate on the differences between the egocentric and the geographic systems. Each system of coordinates has advantages and disadvantages, and in practice we use both in our daily lives, depending on their appropriateness to the context. It would be most natural to use cardinal directions when giving instructions for hiking in the open countryside, for example, or more generally for talking about large-scale orientation. “Oregon is north of California” is more natural than “Oregon is to the right of California if you’re facing the sea.” Even inside some cities, especially those with clear geographic axes, people use fixed geographic concepts such as “uptown” or “downtown.” But on the whole, when giving driving or walking directions in town, it is far more usual to use the egocentric coordinates: “turn left, then take the third right,” and so on. The egocentric coordinates are even more dominant when we describe small-scale spaces, especially inside buildings. The geographic directions may not be entirely absent (real estate agents may wax lyrical about south-facing living rooms, for instance), but this usage is at best marginal. Just think how ridiculous it would be to say “When you get out of the elevator, walk south and then take the second door to the east.” When Pooh gets wedged in Rabbit’s front doorway and is forced to remain there for a whole week to reduce his girth, A. A. Milne refers to the “North end” and “the South end” of Pooh and thereby highlights the desperate fixity of his predicament. But think how absurd it would be for an aerobic trainer or a ballet teacher to say “now raise your north hand and move your so
uth leg eastward.”

  Why does the egocentric system feel so much easier and more natural to handle? Simply because we always know where “in front of” us is and where “behind” and “left” and “right” are. We don’t need a map or a compass to work this out, we don’t need to look at the sun or the North Star, we just feel it, because the egocentric system of coordinates is based directly on our own body and our immediate visual field. The front-back axis cuts right between our two eyes: it is a long imaginary line that extends straight from our nose into the distance and which turns with our nose and eyes wherever and whenever they turn. And likewise, the left-right axis, which cuts through our shoulders, always obligingly adapts itself to our own orientation.