The system of geographic coordinates, on the other hand, is based on external concepts that do not adapt themselves to our own orientation and that need to be computed (or remembered) from the position of the sun or the stars or from features of the landscape. So on the whole, we revert to the geographic coordinates only when we really need to do so: if the egocentric system is not up for the task or if the geographic directions are specifically relevant (for instance, in evaluating the merits of south-facing rooms).
Indeed, philosophers and psychologists from Kant onwards have argued that all spatial thinking is essentially egocentric in nature and that our primary notions of space are derived from the planes that go through our bodies. One of the trump arguments for the primacy of the egocentric coordinates was of course human language. The universal reliance of languages on the egocentric coordinates, and the privileged position that all languages accord the egocentric coordinates over all other systems, was said to parade before us the universal features of the human mind.
But then came Guugu Yimithirr. And then came the astounding realization that those naked Aborigines who two centuries ago gave the kangaroo to the world had never heard of Immanuel Kant. Or at least they had never read his famous 1768 paper on the primacy of the egocentric conception of space to language and mind. Or at the very least, if they had read it, they never got round to applying Kant’s analysis to their language. As it turns out, their language does not make any use of egocentric coordinates at all!
CRYING NOSE TO THE SOUTH
In retrospect, it seems almost a miracle that when John Haviland started researching Guugu Yimithirr in the 1970s, he could still find anyone who spoke the language at all. For the Aborigines’ brush with civilization was not entirely conducive to the conservation of their language.
After Captain Cook departed in 1770, the Guugu Yimithirr were at first spared intense contact with Europeans, and for a whole century were largely left to their own devices. But when the forces of progress eventually did arrive, they came with lightning speed. Gold was discovered in the area in 1873, not far from the spot where Cook’s Endeavour had once moored, and a town named after Cook was founded—quite literally—overnight. One Friday in October 1873, a ship full of prospectors sailed into a silent, lonely, distant river mouth. And on the Saturday, as one of the travelers later described, “we were in the middle of a young diggings township—men hurrying to and fro, tents rising in all directions, the shouts of sailors and labourers landing more horses and cargo, combined with the rattling of the donkey-engine, cranes and chains.” Following in the footsteps of the diggers, farmers started taking up properties along the Endeavour River. The prospectors needed land for mining, and the farmers needed the land and the water holes for their cattle. In the new order, there was not much space left for the Guugu Yimithirr. The farmers resented their burning of grass and chasing the cattle away from the water holes, so the police were employed to remove the natives from the settlers’ land. The Aborigines reacted with a certain degree of antagonism, and this in turn provoked the settlers to a policy of extermination. Less than a year after Cooktown was founded, the Cooktown Herald explained in an editorial that “when savages are pitted against civilisation, they must go to the wall; it is the fate of their race. Much as we may deplore the necessity for such a state of things, it is absolutely necessary, in order that the onward march of civilisation may not be arrested by the antagonism of the aboriginals.” The threats were not empty, for the ideology was carried out through a policy of “dispersion,” which meant shooting aboriginal camps out of existence. Those natives who had not been “dispersed” either retreated in isolated bands into the bush or were drawn to the town, where they were reduced to drink and prostitution.
In 1886, thirteen years after Cooktown was founded, Bavarian missionaries established a Lutheran mission at Cape Bedford, to the north of the town, to try to salvage the wrecked souls of the lost pagans. Later, the mission moved to a place christened Hopevale, farther inland. The mission became a sanctuary for the remaining Aborigines from the entire region and beyond. Although people speaking many different aboriginal languages were brought to Hopevale, Guugu Yimithirr was dominant and became the language of the whole community. A Mr. Schwarz, the head of the mission, translated the Bible into Guugu Yimithirr, and although his command of the language was moderate, his faulty Guugu Yimithirr eventually became enshrined as a kind of “church language,” which people can’t easily understand but which enjoys an aura much like that of the English of the King James Bible.
In the following decades, the mission underwent further trials and tribulations. During World War II, the whole community was forcefully relocated to the south, and the septuagenarian missionary Schwarz, who had arrived in Cooktown aged nineteen and had lived among the Guugu Yimithirr for half a century, was interred as an enemy alien. And yet, defying the odds, the Guugu Yimithirr language somehow refused to give up the ghost. Well into the 1980s, there were still some older men around who spoke an authentic version of the language.
Haviland discovered that Guugu Yimithirr, as spoken by the older generation, does not have words for “left” or “right” as directions at all. Even more strangely, it does not even use terms such as “in front of” or “behind” to describe the position of objects. Whenever we would use the egocentric system, the Guugu Yimithirr use the four cardinal directions: gungga (North), jiba (South), guwa (West), and naga (East). (In practice, their directions are slightly skewed from the compass North, by about 17 degrees, but this is of not much consequence to our present concerns.)
If Guugu Yimithirr speakers want someone to move over in a car to make room, they will say naga-naga manaayi, which means “move a bit to the east.” If they want to tell you to move a bit back from the table, they will say guwa-gu manaayi, “move a bit to the west.” It is even unusual to say only “move a bit that way” in Guugu Yimithirr. Rather, one has to add the correct direction “move a bit that way to the south.” Instead of saying that John is “in front of the tree,” they would say, “John is just north of the tree.” If they want to tell you to take the next left turn, they would say, “go south here.” To tell you where exactly they left something in your house, they would say, “I left it on the southern edge of the western table.” To tell you to turn off the camping stove, they would say, “turn the knob east.”
In the 1980s, another linguist, Stephen Levinson, also came to Hopevale, and he describes some of his outlandish experiences with Guugu Yimithirr direction giving. One day, while he was trying to film the poet Tulo telling a traditional myth, Tulo suddenly told him to stop and “look out for that big ant just north of your foot.” In another instance, a Guugu Yimithirr speaker called Roger explained where frozen fish could be found in a shop some thirty miles away. You will find them “far end this side,” Roger said, gesturing to his right with two flicks of the hand. Levinson assumed that the movement indicated that when one entered the shop the frozen fish were to be found on the right-hand side. But no, it turned out that the fish were actually on the left when you entered the shop. So why the gesture to the right? Roger was not gesturing to the right at all. He was pointing to the northeast, and expected his hearer to understand that when he went into the shop he should look for the fish in the northeast corner.
It gets curiouser. When older speakers of Guugu Yimithirr were shown a short silent film on a television screen and then asked to describe the movements of the protagonists, their responses depended on the orientation of the television when they were watching. If the television was facing north and a man on the screen appeared to be approaching, the older men would say that the man was “coming northward.” One younger man then remarked that you always know which way the TV was facing when the old people tell the story.
The same reliance on geographic directions is maintained even when speakers of Guugu Yimithirr are asked to describe a picture inside a book. Suppose the book is facing top side north. If a man is shown standing t
o the left of a woman, speakers of Guugu Yimithirr would say, “the man is to the west of the woman.” But if you rotate the book top side east, they will say, about exactly the same picture, “the man is to the north of the woman.” Here, for instance, is how one Guugu Yimithirr speaker described the above picture (guess which way he was facing): bula gabiir gabiir, “two girls,” nyulu nubuun yindu buthiil naga, “the one has nose to the east,” nyulu yindu buthiil jibaarr, “the other nose to the south,” yugu gaarbaarr yuulili, “a tree stands in between,” buthiil jibaarr nyulu baajiiljil, “she’s crying nose to the south.”
If you are reading a book facing north, and a Guugu Yimithirr speaker wants to tell you to skip ahead, he will say, “go further east,” because the pages are flipped from east to west. If you are looking at it facing south, the Guugu Yimithirr will of course say, “go further west.” They even dream in cardinal directions. One person explained how he entered heaven in a dream, going northward, while the Lord was coming toward him southward.
There are words for “left hand” and “right hand” in Guugu Yimithirr. But they are used only to refer to the inherent properties of each hand (for instance, to say “I can lift this with my right hand but not with my left hand”). Whenever the position of a hand in any particular moment is to be indicated, an expression such as “hand on the western side” is used.
In our language, the coordinates rotate with us whenever and wherever we turn. For the Guugu Yimithirr, the axes always remain constant. One way of visualizing this difference is to think of the two options on the displays of satellite navigation systems. Many of these gadgets let you choose between a “north up” and a “driving direction up” display. In the “driving direction up” mode, you always see yourself moving directly upwards on the screen, but the streets around you keep rotating as you turn. In the “north up” mode, the streets always stay in the same position, but you see the arrow representing you turning in different directions, so that if you are driving south, the arrow will be moving downwards. Our linguistic world is primarily in the “driving direction up” mode, but in Guugu Yimithirr one speaks exclusively in the “north up” mode.
A CRUMB ON YOUR SEAWARD CHEEK
The first reaction to these reports would be to dismiss them as an elaborate practical joke played by bored Aborigines on a few gullible linguists, not unlike the tall stories of sexual liberation that were told to the anthropologist Margaret Mead by adolescent Samoan girls in the 1920s. The Guugu Yimithirr may not have heard of Kant, but they somehow must have got their hands on My Adventures on the Remote Island of Zift and decided to invent something that would out-nonsense even the Ziftish concepts “bose” and “rird.” But how on earth did they manage to conjure up something so utterly unlikely and at odds with the rest of the world?
Well, it turns out that Guugu Yimithirr is not quite as unusual as one might imagine. Once again, we have simply mistaken the familiar for the natural: the egocentric system could be paraded as a universal feature of human language only because no one had bothered to examine in depth those languages that happen to do things differently. In retrospect, it seems strange that such a striking feature of many languages could have gone unnoticed for such a long time, especially since clues had been littering the academic literature for a while. References to unusual ways of talking about space (such as “your west foot” or “could you pass me the tobacco there to the east”) appeared in reports about various languages around the world, but it was not clear from them that such unusual expressions went beyond the occasional oddity. It took the extreme case of Guugu Yimithirr to inspire a systematic examination of the spatial coordinates in a large range of languages, and only then did the radical divergence of some languages from what had previously been considered universal and natural start sinking in.
To begin with, in Australia itself the reliance on geographic coordinates is very common. From the Djaru language of Kimberley in Western Australia, to Warlbiri, spoken around Alice Springs, to Kayardild, once spoken on Bentinck Island in Queensland, it seems that most Aborigines speak (or at least used to speak) in a distinctly Guugu Yimithirr style. Nor is this peculiar way merely an antipodean aberration: languages that rely primarily on geographic coordinates turn out to be scattered around the world, from Polynesia to Mexico, from Bali and Nepal to Namibia and Madagascar.
Other than Guugu Yimithirr, the “geographic language” that has received the most attention so far is found on the other side of the globe, in the highlands of southeastern Mexico. In fact, we have already come across the Mayan language Tzeltal, in an entirely different context. (Tzeltal was one of the languages in Berlin and Kay’s 1969 study of color terms. The fact that its speakers chose either a clear green or a clear blue as the best example of their “grue” color was an inspiration for Berlin and Kay’s theory of universal foci.) Tzeltal speakers live on a side of a mountain range that rises roughly toward the south and slopes down toward the north. Unlike in Guugu Yimithirr, their geographic axes are based not on the compass directions North-South and East-West but rather on this prominent feature of their local landscape. The directions in Tzeltal are “downhill,” “uphill,” and “across,” which can mean either way on the axis perpendicular to uphill-downhill. When a specific direction on the across axis is required, Tzeltal speakers combine “across” with a place-name and say “across in the direction of X.”
Geographic coordinate systems that are based on prominent landmarks are also found in other parts of the world. In the language of the Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia, for example, the main axis is defined by the opposition sea-inland. A Marquesan would thus say that a plate on the table is “inland of the glass” or that you have a crumb “on your seaward cheek.” There are also systems that combine both cardinal directions and geographic landmarks. In the language of the Indonesian island of Bali, one axis is based on the sun (East-West) and the other axis is based on geographic landmarks: it stretches “seaward” on one side and “mountainward” on the other, toward the holy volcano Gunung Agung, the dwelling place of the Hindu gods of Bali.
Earlier on I said that it would be the height of absurdity for a dance teacher to say things like “now raise your north hand and take three steps eastwards.” But the joke would be lost on some. The Canadian musicologist Colin McPhee spent several years on Bali in the 1930s, researching the musical traditions of the island. In his book A House in Bali, he recalls a young boy called Sampih who showed great talent and enthusiasm for dancing. As there was no suitable teacher in the boy’s village, McPhee persuaded Sampih’s mother to let him take the boy to a teacher in a different village, so that he could learn the rudiments of the art. Once McPhee had made all the arrangements, he traveled with Sampih to the teacher, left him there, and promised he would come back after five days to check how the boy was progressing. Given Sampih’s talent, McPhee was sure that after five days he would be interrupting an advanced lesson. But when he returned, he found Sampih dejected, almost ill, and the teacher exasperated. It was impossible to teach the boy to dance, said the teacher, since Sampih simply did not understand any of the instructions. Why? Because Sampih did not know where “mountainward,” “seaward,” “east,” and “west” were, so when he was told to take “three steps mountainward” or to “bend east” he didn’t know what to do. Sampih would not have had the least trouble with these directions in his own village, but since he had never left his village before and since the landscape here was unfamiliar, he got disoriented and confused. No matter how often the teacher pointed at the mountainward direction, Sampih kept forgetting. It was all in vain.
Why didn’t the teacher try to use different instructions? He would probably have replied that saying “take three steps forward” or “bend backward” would be the height of absurdity.
PERFECT PITCH FOR DIRECTIONS
What I have reported so far are just facts. They may seem strange, and it is certainly strange that they were discovered only so recently, but the evidence
collected by many researchers in different parts of the world no longer leaves room for doubt about their veracity. We venture onto riskier ground, however, when we move from the facts about language to their possible implications on the mind. Different cultures certainly make people speak about space in radically different ways. But does this necessarily mean that the speakers also think about space differently? By now red lights should be flashing and we should be on Whorf alert. It should be clear that if a language doesn’t have a word for a certain concept, that does not necessarily mean its speakers cannot understand this concept.
Indeed, Guugu Yimithirr speakers are perfectly able to understand the concepts of left and right when they speak English. Ironically, it seems that some of them even entertained Whorfian notions about the alleged inability of English speakers to understand cardinal directions. John Haviland reports how he was once working with an informant on translating traditional Guugu Yimithirr tales into English. One story concerned a lagoon that lies “west of the Cooktown airport”—a description that most English speakers would find perfectly natural and understand perfectly well. But his Guugu Yimithirr informant suddenly said: “But white fellows wouldn’t understand that. In English we’d better say, ‘to the right as you drive to the airport.’ ”
Instead of searching in vain for how the lack of egocentric coordinates might constrain the Guugu Yimithirr’s intellectual horizons, we should turn to the Boas-Jakobson principle and look for the difference in what languages oblige their speakers to convey rather than in what they allow them to convey. In this particular case, the relevant question is what habits of mind might develop in speakers of Guugu Yimithirr because of the necessity to specify geographic directions whenever spatial information is to be communicated.
Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages Page 19
