The Language Wars

by Henry Hitchings

  At the same time, native speakers of English tend to assume that their ability in this potent language makes it unimportant to learn other languages. The reality is different. British companies often miss out on export opportunities because of a lack of relevant language skills.17 Moreover, there is a chance that a command of English will within twenty or thirty years be regarded as a basic skill for business, and native speakers of the language will no longer enjoy any competitive advantage. When polled in 2005, more than 80 per cent of people in the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden claimed to be able to speak English. The figure was around 60 per cent in Finland, 50 per cent in Germany, 30 per cent in France and Italy, and 20 per cent in Spain and Turkey.18 These figures can safely be assumed to have increased. They come from a study published in 2006 by the British Council, an organization set up in 1934 and today operating as an ‘international cultural relations body’ in more than a hundred countries. In 1989 its Director General, Sir Richard Francis, stated that ‘Britain’s real black gold is not North Sea oil, but the English language’.19 That view is often played down, but the role of the British Council in promoting British English ties in with British corporate interests. Large companies such as British Petroleum (now BP Amoco) have worked with the British Council, funding educational schemes to encourage foreign nationals to learn English. This is not exactly an act of altruism. As Robert Phillipson punchily says, ‘English for business is business for English.’20 But while English is being pushed, it is also being pulled; it is the language, more than any other, that people want to learn.

  The consequences are complex. Some, it would seem, are not as intended. Even as vast amounts are spent on spreading British English, the reality is that English is taking on more and more local colour in the different places where it is used. Accordingly, while the number of languages in the world is diminishing, the number of Englishes is increasing.

  26

  What do we do with the flowing face of nature?

  Language and the shape of thought

  Talking about the global spread of English and about the march of technology leads, inevitably, to speculations about the future. But what about the language’s role in the immediate present? What, indeed, of the relationship between language and thought?

  It is sometimes said – and it has become quite fashionable to say – that language enables us to construct reality. I might have enclosed that last word within inverted commas, for according to this view reality is a kind of fiction and much of what we hold to be true is a dream inspired by the social world we inhabit. Thus we are continually struggling to wrestle a degree of objectivity from our accustomed subjectivity, although we are hardly likely to see the struggle this way or even to see it as a struggle.

  It makes more sense to say that language enables us to construct an image of reality. Sensory experience is like a stream, which we channel using language. To put this another way, language organizes our fluid impressions of the world. But it is not the world that we are arranging; rather, we are arranging our experience of the world. When we use language we are translating and interpreting our sensuous responses to things outside us. Language frames our experiences. It breaks experience up into pieces – a digital packaging of analogue reality. Different languages do this in different ways. We could say that each language is like a map and manifests distinct conventions about mapping. The geography of the mental territory being mapped is a constant, but it gets represented in a variety of ways.

  While this mapping is an everyday occurrence, it is not a neutral one. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida has argued that ‘everyday language’ is far from innocent: ‘It carries with it … presuppositions of all types’, and these presuppositions, ‘although little attended to, are knotted into a system’.1 One of the more obvious examples of what Derrida is talking about is the tendency to represent the world in terms of oppositions – active versus passive, hero versus coward, good versus bad, inside versus outside, native versus foreign, edible versus inedible, male versus female. These constructions are antagonistic – which is to say, they always favour one and diminish the other. As long as we are happy to believe that experience precedes language we may not worry too much about them. But what if language contaminates the way we think and the way we feel? Is there really such a thing as ‘pure’ language, or are we always translating, compromising, and hypnotizing ourselves with metaphor?

  It suits us in our daily lives to believe that the meanings of words have some primordial reality. We put faith in the apparent connection between language and the phenomena around us. Intuitively, this feels right. But language is a differential system. Thought, we might usefully say, is the perception of relationships – of differences.

  In the field of language study, the great exponent of this view was Ferdinand de Saussure, whose ideas have been explored by thinkers across the humanities and have served as the starting point for arguments such as those of Derrida. A Swiss who could with justice claim to be a descendant of Henry VII of England, Saussure taught for a decade in Paris and then, from 1891 to 1913, at the University of Geneva. The sole book he published concerned the vowel system of Proto-Indo-European; his lasting influence can be attributed to the decision of two of his Geneva students, Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, to compile an edition of notes they had made in his classes and of other material gleaned while taking his course.

  Saussure stresses that there is no inevitable link between the thing you are signifying and the form in which you signify it. In more concrete terms: the sequence of sounds in the word crocodile is no better suited to talking about the creature we know as a crocodile than any other sequence of sounds would be. The connection is arbitrary, not intrinsic. There are two fairly obvious exceptions to this principle: words made up of others that already exist and contribute to their meaning (lawnmower, corkscrew) and onomatopoeic words (such as boom, clang, kerplunk and the Latin sussurus, meaning ‘whisper’) that imitate the sounds they denote. But these exceptions aside, the principle holds: there is no inherent link between ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’. As Shakespeare’s Juliet says, ‘What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet.’

  All natural languages, rather than naming categories that exist already, enunciate their own categories. This is demonstrated by the way words change their meaning: as we know, instead of standing still, the concept that a word denotes may shift. If the relationship between words and the things they denote included some sort of ‘natural connection’, words would be sequestered from the effects of history. This is not how language works. As Saussure commented, a ‘language is a system of pure values which are determined by nothing except the momentary arrangement of its terms’.2 It is the influence of Saussure that lies behind modern language scholars’ repudiation of the prescriptive tradition; he argued that linguistics should establish itself as a science, and indeed he achieved a scientific footing for the subject.

  Language enables us to make our feelings public – accessible to others, influential. It also has another important effect: it makes us moral creatures. The link between language and morality is indissoluble. But that’s not to say that it is obvious. Our system of morality is created and maintained through language. It is achieved through our (largely unnoticed) conversations with ourselves and through larger, public conversations. One simple form this takes is our statements about categories to which we say we belong, or in which we place others. This begins when we are children: the critical period for our acquisition of language is also critical for our development of social skills and moral capacities. Categories enable us to function socially. By means of categorization, language provides scope for rewards and punishments, and enables cooperation and solidarity – as well as deception. Language is recursive, allowing us to generate an infinite variety of expressions from finite resources, and morality is recursive, too, for we can moralize about an infinite number of matters and can also moralize infinitely about a
single matter. What’s more, we can refer to situations that are at some remove from our own, even imaginary or unreal.3 Our ability to hypothesize, rather than being trivial, is crucial to our moral judgement.

  Metaphor plays a crucial role in enabling us to engage with unfamiliar or abstract subject matter. When we talk about moral issues, we rely heavily on metaphor. It is customary to conceive of morality itself as strength and as something that sustains us. English possesses a wealth of metaphor that sets store by sincerity, justice, generosity, caring for others, listening, self-control and safety.

  Let us look for a moment at some of the everyday metaphors by which we live. They tend to cluster. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, who have studied the subject in detail, note the prevalence of ‘orientational metaphors’: health, control, high status and virtue are ‘up’, while sickness, being subject to control, low status and depravity are ‘down’. Lakoff and Johnson illustrate the way we speak of an argument as a journey (‘We will proceed in a step-by-step fashion’, ‘Do you follow?’) and also a container (‘The argument has holes in it’, ‘I’m tired of your empty arguments’), and they show how these different characterizations are compatible.4

  Metaphors help organize our experience coherently. They vivify the abstract. Money is equated with blood; its flow is invigorating, we are flush with funds, cash is injected, liquidity gets squeezed, cash circulates, funds haemorrhage from an ailing business, and exploitative individuals (bloodsuckers?) will bleed you dry. Knowledge is to a significant degree thought of – seen – as sight, and ignorance is blindness, darkness, the condition of night. Love is, among other things, madness, conflict and a gravitational force. Sex is violence: I may not need to spell this out, but consider, for instance, the images of the man-eater and lady-killer, a large portion of the slang terms for the penis, and casual talk of a ‘conquest’ or ‘making a pass’ (the latter an image from the realm of sword-fighting). Andrew Goatly, who has written at length about the sex/violence connection, goes so far as to suggest a link between sexual metaphors and rape, observing that ‘juries and judges do not recognize rape for what it is, maybe because of the tendency to conceptualize sex as violence.’5 We may think that such associations are long-standing and immutable, but it seems that ideology can skew our everyday metaphors. To think that everything is a commodity, that enterprise equals wisdom, that change is development: these ideas are not eternal and unquestionable, although they are often presented thus. By the same token, the metaphorical language of capitalism has intertwined itself with the metaphors we use of freedom and democracy: success is movement, freedom is movement, creativity is wealth, quality is size, ownership is identity.

  Many everyday metaphors are dead, the fossilized remains of what were once original and poetic statements. Creating new ones is tricky, though: attempts often fail. We have all come across so-called mixed metaphors, which are reviled because of their clumsiness. When we experience this clumsiness, we feel that meaning has been tainted. Metaphor conveys an impression of likeness between one thing and another. Where that likeness is at its fullest, we find significance. A successful metaphor may enable a discovery. When Wallace Stevens writes that a poem is a meteor, we probably think of certain attributes of meteors that a poem could share: a poem is a sudden streak of bright light, something rare that fades within a moment of being witnessed, debris shed by a comet (the comet perhaps being inspiration), or, more trivially, something we are most likely to see – to appreciate – at night. When a metaphor is mixed, the connection is broken. Instead we see a ludicrous misalignment. If I were to write ‘A poem is a meteor hammering home a poet’s ideas’, you would no longer value the connection I make between poems and meteors, because what follows the word meteor is remote from your image of what meteors are and what they do. By extending the metaphor in an inaccessible direction, I have made the whole of it preposterous. However, sometimes a metaphor can, precisely because of its dividedness or diffuseness, say something interesting about the thing described – its elusiveness, maybe – or about the way we perceive it. When Hamlet wonders if he should ‘take arms against a sea of troubles’, his metaphor is mixed, but we infer that he is hinting at the likely ineffectiveness of an armed solution to his troubles, which are too fluid and huge to be dealt with in this way.

  We may imagine that certain emotions are basic parts of human experience: happiness and sadness, fear, surprise, disgust and rage feel as though they ought to be universal. The facial expressions which communicate feelings such as disgust, surprise and happiness do indeed seem to be biological rather than cultural in origin. But when we use language to describe emotion – as opposed to expressing it by exclaiming wow or ugh – we are cramping or grooving our feelings, and in the process we are regulating them. When we examine ourselves honestly we see that often our emotions are not entirely separate and that the distinctions we make between them are not completely clear. Language can seem like a grid dividing and compartmentalizing our feelings, and different languages do this in different ways. To take an everyday example, we may compare the ways languages articulate love. The Spanish equivalent of ‘I love you’ is ‘te quiero’, which expresses want, whereas a Finn says ‘rakastan sinua’, meaning roughly ‘I love a part of you’. Alongside these, the French ‘je t’aime’ sounds blithe. But if it seems at least plausible that our accustomed vocabulary has a bearing on the ways we see and feel, what of our grammar? Can it too shape our outlook?

  The notion that grammar ‘is’ thought – that grammatical categories classify experience, and that different languages do this in different ways – was advanced by Franz Boas, a scholar best known for developing anthropology into a professional discipline, in the early years of the last century. Boas believed that a language’s ways of classifying experience reflected thought rather than dictating it. His ideas were developed by one of his outstanding students, Edward Sapir, whom we briefly met in an earlier chapter. Sapir turned the argument around, claiming that we read experience according to categories that do not in fact directly correspond to it. Every language, according to Sapir, channels thought in its own way. A language’s system of classification shapes the interpretation of experience. Sapir went so far as to say that no two languages were sufficiently similar to represent the same reality.

  Sapir’s student Benjamin Lee Whorf built on this. Besides being an enthusiastic amateur linguist, Whorf was an expert in the field of fire prevention – a somewhat ironic occupation for anyone pushing grand arguments about language. Whorf investigated examples of matters Sapir had treated only in the abstract. ‘The real question,’ he wrote, is ‘What do different languages do … with the flowing face of nature in its motion[?]’6 He suggested that the metaphors of what he called Standard Average European languages such as English imposed certain ways of perceiving relationships in space and time. These, he said, differed sharply from those evident in the Amerindian language Hopi: he claimed that in Hopi there are no words or grammatical constructions that enable direct reference to time, to the past or the future, or to the notion of something lasting, and that the language’s speakers have little interest in matters such as chronology, sequence and measurable lengths of time. ‘The Hopi metaphysics,’ he wrote, ‘imposes upon the universe two grand cosmic forms, which … we may call manifested and manifesting.’ By contrast, ‘The metaphysics underlying our own language … imposes upon the universe two grand cosmic forms, space and time.’ He concluded that ‘Every language contains terms that have come to attain cosmic scope of reference, that crystallize in themselves the basic postulates of an unformulated philosophy, in which is couched the thought of a people’. As a result ‘Hopi, with its preference for verbs, as contrasted to our own liking for nouns, perpetually turns our propositions about things into propositions about events’.7

  In a separate move that had unexpectedly lasting consequences, Whorf followed up some remarks made by Boas about the number of words North American Indians have for snow. He claimed tha
t to an Eskimo (the preferred term now is usually Inuit) the ‘all-inclusive’ word snow ‘would be almost unthinkable; he would say that falling snow, slushy snow, and so on, are sensuously and operationally different, different things to contend with; he uses different words for them and for other kinds of snow’.8 Later authors, seduced by this notion, made specific and increasingly large estimates of the number of different words, going as high as four hundred. They also suggested that Inuit paid more attention to differentiating types of snow because they had a larger number of words for them.

  The idea put forward by Boas, altered by Sapir and re-examined by Whorf, came to be known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. As broadcast by anthropologists and psychologists, the argument at its simplest is that a language’s distinct forms oblige its users to see reality in a particular way. That is, we dissect the world around us according to lines our language has laid down. The community to which we belong predisposes the way we interpret everything. By extension, one’s behaviour may be seen as a function of the language one speaks, and there are concepts we cannot entertain because they have no names in our language. This line of thinking has been pursued by numerous researchers and writers. For instance, Alfred Bloom’s work on the differences between English and Mandarin Chinese has led him to suggest that speakers of English have a greater facility for theoretical and counterfactual thinking.9 In 2004 a journalist wrote in the New York Times about the Kawesqar people of southern Chile, who ‘rarely use the future tense; given the contingency of moving constantly by canoe, it was all but unnecessary’.10