Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue

by John Mcwhorter

  Now, as it happens, Whorf was not unaware that languages are always picking things up from one another, noting, “It is clear that linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity cannot be absolute in the face of the known facts of linguistic change, multilingualism, and cultural diffusion.”

  But even then, note what he wrote next: “People do make new discriminations and find linguistic expressions for them, often by borrowing.” It sounds as if Whorf thought that speakers of a language took in features from another language only if those features provided a way of expressing the “new discriminations” they had fallen into.

  That is, meaningless do made its way into English because English speakers for some reason had become uniquely alert to negation and questionhood and were ripe for some nearby language to give them a way to vent this alertness? But what about how in South Africa, Xhosa and Zulu picked up click sounds from Khoisan languages? Was it because they had drifted into a latent desire to make such sounds and the Khoisan languages just happened to fulfill the need? Or was it because, well, the languages spoken next door happened to have clicks in them? Clearly, drifting into “new discriminations” is not a precondition for taking a feature from another language. The precondition is, simply, proximity.

  And then, what about how English got easier over the centuries? According to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, compared to Old English speakers, Modern English speakers are dimwits.

  Since we no longer classify our nouns by gender, we are less sensitive to masculinity and femininity as abstract concepts. This implies that the fashion in late-twentieth-century academia for treating gender as a societal construct had actually penetrated the world view of Joe Barstool (Tavernstool?) as early as A.D. 1200.

  We are, apparently, less alert to the fact that anger, remembrance, error, fear, and shame are things that we ourselves feel. Old English speakers “feared themselves” when they felt afraid just as they behaved themselves. These days, apparently, there is always a part of an Anglophone that supposes that, just maybe, his feelings are experienced by someone else.

  And then, never mind that when we see a car coming, the fact that it is moving to here (hither) rather than already here is less vivid to us than it was vivid to an Anglo-Saxon farmer that a carriage was coming toward him rather than resting in front of him. Old English “cut nature up” in a way that rendered those farmers more aware of movement than we must be, with our one-size-fits-all here, there, and where.

  We are also less clear on the difference between the immediate context of people we are talking to in the moment and people in the abstract. The Old English speaker had the pronoun man (actually pronounced “mon” in the way that we today associate with Anglophone Caribbeans) to refer to an abstract “they”—Man says that the language is getting easier—or “one”—Man speaks Old English here! But even though the typical Old English speaker spent his life in a village whereas the typical Modern English speaker has read newspapers, traveled some, and today has broadband, the Old English speaker’s grammar rendered him more cosmopolitan than we are, more aware of a world beyond his own head.

  And forget our processing that when we have e-mailed something, an action has been performed while when we have left, a state has arisen in which we are gone. When using the perfect, Old English speakers used be instead of have, with a bunch of verbs that referred more to how things ended up than an event happening. Apparently to us today, “states, schmates”—everything is an action.

  In the several-decades’-deep literature on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, I am aware of no address of what its implications would be for how a language has changed over time. This is a serious problem, because if there is anything really interesting to the hypothesis, then surely we seek meaningful correlations between the culture of Anglo-Saxons, who spoke a grammar like German’s, and the culture of Modern English speakers, who speak a language a little like Welsh and a lot like nothing else.

  I venture that no scholar will see it as promising to investigate whether Modern English speakers are psychologically less alert to the nuance of daily experience than Anglo-Saxon villagers. And to the extent that Whorfians object that it is a two-way street and culture can also affect grammar, we wonder what it was about England becoming a literate, industrialized society that would have encouraged a simpler grammar.

  The disconnection between cultural development and grammar is also clear in that societies have turned upside down over time while the grammar stayed put. As psychologist Herbert Clark has put it, if the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis “has any force historically, we should find examples of beliefs failing to change over time because of the conventions that exist in the language. Such examples do not readily come to mind.”

  Right—take Russia. All would agree that certain changes have occurred in prevailing beliefs in that country over the past thousand years—from brute feudalism under the tsars to Communism to glasnost to the queer blend of democracy and dictatorship of today. Yet Russian grammar during that time has always been the marvelous nightmare that it is now. Russian has changed, to be sure, but without equivalents to the Celtic adoption and the Viking disruption, and nowhere near as dramatically as English—and in no ways that could be correlated with things Peter the Great, the Romanovs, or Lenin did.

  Whorfianism as Zeitgeist: Thinking People’s Street Myth

  Whenever you read someone making reference to the Whorfian perspective on language, whoever the writer picked it up from has never had occasion to address just why Modern English speakers are not rather troglodytic creatures compared to Anglo-Saxon-speaking warriors.

  In general, there is curiously little interest among people fascinated by the Whorfian paradigm in examining whether a given grammatical trait conditions a certain way of thinking not just in one language, but in other ones. As towering a mind as literary critic Edmund Wilson, for example, thought the reason Russians seemed unable to keep to a schedule was that Russian is a language where future tense is indicated largely via context—but then Japanese is like that, too, and the Japanese have never seemed to have any problem with schedules.

  Journalist Mark Abley, engaging writer though he is, falls into this trap in his enthusiasm for Whorfianism. In French and many other Western European languages, there are two words for know: savoir means to know a fact; connaître means to know a person or to be familiar with something. Abley has it that:

  My language allows me, somewhat clumsily, to get the distinction across: on the one hand, factual knowledge; on the other, acquaintanceship and understanding. But to a French speaker, that distinction is central to how the mind interacts with the world.

  Really? Is Abley really so sure that the difference between knowing the capital of Nebraska and knowing a friend is more immediate to Gérard Depardieu than to Judi Dench? It’s a cute idea, yes—but does Abley actually have any grounds for supposing that it is true?

  How does it sound when it’s French that has one word where English has more, and when it isn’t something as immediately evident as the European know verbs? In French, sortir means “go out,” but also covers what English would express with come out (in the earthquake, le tiroir est sorti de la commode, “the drawer came out of the dresser”), get out (someone is in a hole and says, “Sors-moi d’ici!” “Get me out of here!”), and stick out as in one’s tongue (“Sors la langue,” “Stick out your tongue”).

  So—are we English speakers more attuned than French speakers to the difference between leaving home, something slipping out of place, being yanked out of a hole, and sticking out our tongues? I would venture that the answer is no. To be a reasoning representative of Homo sapiens is to understand those four processes as radically different, whether or not your language happens to have the same word for them. The same applies to how your language happens to mark knowing.

  Abley also shows us that the Boro language of India has verbs with charmingly specific meanings. The implication is that to speak Boro is to be uniquely attuned to these highly parti
cular concepts, such as:

  egthu: when people getting to know one another start to establish a sense of comfort and connection

  onsay: musky bodily odor, especially that emanating from the armpits, of a kind not ideal but vaguely pleasant

  goblo: when a romantic pair have been estranged for a long period and decide to be together again

  khonsay: to have sex for the first time with someone you are in a romantic relationship with

  asusu: when a member of a couple stays always a vigilant foot or so away from the other member at a social occasion

  Interesting that a culture would choose those highly particular aspects of experience to assign words to. Or is it?—I actually dissembled there. The language with words for those concepts is good old English; namely, bonding, funk, reconciliation, consummate, and hover.

  Upon which now we can take a look at what the Boro words actually mean:

  egthu: to create a pinching sensation in the armpit

  khonsay: to pick an object up with care as it is rare or scarce

  onsay: to pretend to love

  goblo: to be fat (as a child or infant)

  asusu: to feel unknown and uneasy in a new place

  Abley’s idea is that to speak Boro is to be uniquely attuned to these concepts. However, when speakers of a language are asked what a word means, quite often they give particular uses that happen to be especially common, rather than the larger concept the word technically covers. For example, if someone asked you what consummate meant, you would likely give the sexual meaning, although you technically know that consummate means, more generally, “to bring to the highest level.” “What’s bonding?” someone asks you. You might say “When things stick together.” But you also might say “When you first feel a click with someone, like guys bonding over sports.”

  This is surely a lot of what is behind the Boro verbs. After all, English has ways of expressing many of those concepts. “To create a pinching sensation in the armpit” can be expressed in English as cinch up into—and is egthu in Boro used exclusively with armpits, or was that what the consulted speaker most readily mentioned? To pick an object up with care in English can be to pluck it out. We have no verb for “to be fat as a child” but we have a noun, baby fat, which refers to exactly what the Boro word does, except not as a verb. The issue is not what part of speech people happen to express a concept in, but whether their language “feels” it. Well, on babies’ fat, English feels it, as do quite certainly all languages on earth.

  In the same way, we have no verb like asusu for not feeling at home, but we have positive adjectives like acclimated and situated—I wasn’t situated yet and so I was still calling home every night. English speakers are attuned to the same mental state that Boro speakers are when they asusu.

  And even where Boro really does have a word marking a fine shade of human experience that English does not—I draw a blank on an English equivalent to “pretend to love”—it still doesn’t follow that this experience is more deeply felt by them than the rest of us.

  Looking at our own language is an especially effective way of truly getting this. In English, something in spot four is fourth, in spot seven is seventh, in spot eight is eighth, and so on. Only the first three numbers are distorted in a major way: first and second don’t correspond to one and two at all, and third clearly has three in there, but beaten up a bit, and what’s with the -rd? There’s no sixrd or tenrd.

  Well, that’s something else weird about English and European languages. Most of the world’s languages have a special word for the first spot, like first, but then just say, as it were, “two-th,” “three-th.” So English’s second, Spanish’s segundo, and Russian’s vtoroj (when two is dva) mean that these languages channel our European language speakers’ thoughts into a heightened awareness of secondness, I suppose. That is, an English, Spanish, or Russian speaker is more sensitive to things being second than a German, a Turk, an Inuit, or an Israeli . . . Come on. We just happen to have a distinct word marking secondness; the Boro just happen to have a word for pretending to love.

  Politics or Science?

  Among academics and beyond, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been, quite commonly, less examined than embraced. One of the reasons: what interests many about the hypothesis is less what it would imply for academic issues about human psychology than its demonstration that indigenous cultures are not “primitive,” and in fact may have some things on us.

  This was an explicit mission of Sapir, and an invaluable one in itself. It is to him and like-minded thinkers of his time such as his mentor anthropologist Franz Boas that it is part of the warp and woof of modern Westerners to view other cultures as variations on being human rather than “savages.” Gone are the days when America could stampede into the Philippines as it did during the McKinley administration, casually assuming that the “natives” needed to be “civilized.”

  Whorf inherited the diversity imperative from Sapir, and it permeates his writings on Hopi. To Whorf, Hopi and the world view it supposedly conditioned was not just different, but better:

  Does the Hopi language show here a higher plane of thinking, a more rational analysis of situations, than our vaunted English? Of course it does. In this field and in various others, English compared to Hopi is like a bludgeon compared to a rapier.

  We Westerners are obsessed with putting things into little boxes, drawing boundaries—the Hopi, however, are more in touch with higher realities:

  Our objectified view of time is, however, favorable to historicity and to everything connected with the keeping of records, while the Hopi view is unfavorable thereto. The latter is too subtle, complex, and ever-developing, supplying no ready-made answer to the question of when “one” event ends and “another” begins.

  The problem with this kind of thing is that too often it ends up, in essence, taking us back to the noble savage. Noble, to be sure, but in what we celebrate in them as special, savage—clothed chimpanzees, cute.

  Mark Abley, for instance, seizes upon a grammatical quirk in the Native American languages of the Algonquian family, such as Cree, Ojibwa, and the Powhatan that Pocahontas spoke. In one of them, Montagnais, the way you say You see me is:

  Tshi - ua:pam - in.

  you see me

  But the way to say I see you is not to put I before the verb and you after. That is, reversing the example above and doing

  is wrong; it is not Montagnais at all, any more than Reading book you a are is English.

  In - ua:pam - tshi.

  I see you

  Instead, you use the You see me sentence, but stick a little syllable into it to make it mean I see you:

  Tshi - ua:pam - in.

  you see me

  Tshi - ua:pam - it - in.

  you see me = “I see you.”

  So—the basic sentence is about you; only with an adjustment can you make it about I. (That is, indeed, so deliciously odd from our Anglophone perspective. Once again, languages are interesting in their grammars as well as their words.)

  Abley has it that this means that Algonquian language speakers are less self-centered than Europeans, and that “to speak properly, in an Algonquian language, is to be aware of the identities and interrelationships of all the people you address.” But when we are at a Thanksgiving dinner, are we English speakers not fully aware of who is who, despite that we can put I first?

  Abley marvels at the fact that Native Americans are capable of carrying on conversations among multiple participants—which is like praising a culture for cooking food or, really, being more cognitively advanced than their pets.

  And in any case, just as Whorf mischaracterized Hopi, Abley leaves out that in Algonquian languages, I can indeed come first. You, if there, does have to come first, but if there is no you around and the I is interacting with a he, she, it, or they, then I has to come first. In another Algonquian language, Cree, I frighten them is:

  Ni - se:kih - a - wak.

  I frighten them
>
  To say They frighten me you can’t put they first; you make they the subject by sticking in a special syllable:

  Ni - se:kih - ik - wak

  I frighten them = “They frighten me.”

  It looks like Algonquians are just as narcissistic as we are when I am talking about them.

  One episode that pointed up this fundamental commitment to ennobling The Other was the rare language-is-thought study that argued that English speakers are the more insightful ones. Alfred Bloom noted that in Chinese, one must engage in a certain amount of circumlocution to be explicit that something is hypothetical rather than real. In English we can say If you saw my sister, you would know that she was pregnant. But in Chinese, the sentence is rendered as “If you see my sister, you know she is pregnant.” For those who know Mandarin:

  Rúguŏ nĭ kàn dào wo mèimei

  if you see arrive I sister

  nĭ yídìng zhīdào tā huáiyùn le.

  you certainly know she pregnant now

  That sentence can have various meanings. One of them is neutral and not hypothetical:

  “If you see my sister, you’ll know she is pregnant.”