Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue

by John Mcwhorter

Then there are hypothetical meanings, referring to something that has not happened or did not happen:

  “If you saw my sister, you’d know she was pregnant.”

  “If you had seen my sister, you’d have known she was pregnant.”

  In Mandarin, context determines which meaning comes through.

  Bloom did an experiment that showed Chinese speakers less alert to hypotheticality when reading stories in Chinese than English speakers reading the stories in English. On the basis of this, he supposed that since where people’s grammar is concerned, “the thought of the individual must run along its grooves” as the Whorfian I quoted above had it, Mandarin’s grooves must distract thought from the difference between reality and the hypothetical. What’s good for a perceptively challenged Modern English speaker is good for the man on the street in Beijing, right?

  Apparently not: people shot at Bloom like he was a varmint. Their objections to details of his experimental procedure were reasonable, but more conclusive was their insistence that Chinese speakers process hypotheticality via context even if their grammar does not mark it as explicitly as English’s. Elsewhere, however, there is little interest in noting that, say, English speakers understand via context that knowing algebra is different from knowing the man next door, or that even if Hopi did have no tense markers, we could assume that its speakers processed that things happen before and after one another as vividly as we do. I feel reasonably confident in surmising that if Bloom’s study had shown some interpretational deficit among English speakers, no one would have batted an eye.

  A speaker of American Sign Language captured the essence of how Whorfianism unintentionally demeans minority languages, mocking outsider fans of Sign. In an interview, the signer feigned “a vapid, rapt look on his face. ‘Sign language is so beautiful’, he signs, in a gushing mockery of the attitude that exoticizes sign and correspondingly reduces deaf people to the status of pets, mascots. ‘It’s just so wonderful that deaf people can communicate !’ ” Or, I would have it, “It’s just so wonderful that people who aren’t like us can think and process reality as richly as we do!”

  Maybe that message had a certain value in Whorf’s era. In the thirties, popular culture and common consensus in America were still shot through with pitiless condescension toward “natives,” “Chinks,” “jungle bunnies.” But it’s been a while. We clap when our infants don’t spill their food. We can afford to let go of clapping when exotic folks don’t, when in our times, celebrating diversity is a shibboleth of moral legitimacy among thinking First World people, and considerably, if not comprehensively, beyond.

  All Homo sapiens engage in advanced mentation—yes, hallelujah. However, this doesn’t make the Cree speaker a paragon of enlightened selflessness because you comes earlier than I in his way of saying I see you, any more than our ability to explicitly get across If you’d have seen my sister, you’d have known she was pregnant makes us Anglophones wizards of truth versus falsity compared to people in China.

  Does Language Channel Thought?: The Neo-Whorfians

  At this point, one might ask: does language channel thought at all? It is pretty clear that people speaking non-Western languages are not walking around in psychedelic dreamscapes channeling essences of The Real unknown to us “straights” marching around in business suits. However, is it really true that grammar has nothing to do with the way we think?

  Of course not. These days there is research being done in what is often called the Neo-Whorfian School. No more of the mystic, anti-Western hocus-pocus—this is serious psychological research, based on a reasoned curiosity as to whether grammar can channel thought, albeit in ways less dramatic than the straight-up Whorfians were seeking. And there are, indeed, twinkles of evidence in favor of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Nothing mind-bending or kaleidoscopic—just twinkles.

  In some cases, there is a chicken-and-egg issue that makes it hard to see the study as telling us that language channels culture rather than vice versa. The Guugu Yimithirr of Australia do not have terms like in front of. Instead, they refer to everything according to points on the compass—to the north of, to the south of—regardless of where they are in relation to the object. If a tree is in front of them, but in the global sense, it is to the south of them, they refer to it as south of them.

  Neat—but is it that their language just happened not to have terms like in front of and behind and forced them to think of things in terms of compass points, or that their culture happened to focus on compass points and that determined how their language described position? Because the focus on compass points is so clearly a cultural peculiarity compared to most people on earth, it is hard to see from this experiment why grammar is a more likely explanation. More to the point, it isn’t really surprising that people do not have terms for something their culture does not care about—i.e., that observation would not have sparked a whole school of thought the way Whorf’s did.

  In the same way, the Pirahã tribe of the Amazon have attracted media attention as a people whose language has no words for colors, numbers, or quantification (e.g., all, every), and does not even have relative or subordinate clauses—for That’s the guy who built my house one can only say That guy—he built my house. The Pirahã prove incapable of performing even elementary mathematical tasks, and the media first jumped on this, predictably, as proof of the old-fashioned language-makes-thought notion: because the Pirahã language has no numbers, the people are rendered incapable of doing math. Again, however, this puts the cart before the horse. The Pirahã are hunter-gatherers who subsist on their own. Their lives therefore afford them no reason to manipulate precise numerical concepts, such as for trade or constructing elaborate architectural monuments. In addition, the Pirahã are an unusually incurious people (no, really, they are—consult the source in the Notes on Sources), which makes them especially uninterested in fine-grained manipulation of numerals.

  A natural outcome, then, would be that their language would have no words for numbers. The magical idea that language is the issue—i.e., that they would be doing algebra if only it weren’t for the mysterious happenstance that their language has no numbers—may have more visceral oomph, but little else. The Pirahã’s chronicler, Dan Everett, concurs, despite the media’s occasionally making it seem otherwise—it’s what the Pirahã are like that shapes what their language is like, not the other way around. I’m not sure how truly interesting that, in itself, is, despite how interesting the Pirahã are themselves, as well as their language—albeit for reasons other than their grammar purportedly channeling its speakers’ thought patterns.

  More interesting are cases where culture cannot possibly be the issue. In German, the word for key is masculine (der Schlüssel). If you give the key a personal name, Germans tend to have an easier time recalling it if the name is masculine; they more readily associate the key with a picture of a man than a woman, and describe it with words like hard, heavy, jagged, metal, serrated, and useful. In Spanish, the word for key is feminine (la llave), and Spanish speakers are more comfortable with keys’ having female names, associating them with pictures of women, and they tend to describe them as golden, intricate, little, lovely, shiny and tiny. Maybe it is relevant that when I once asked a Dutch person what keys were like (key in Dutch is the masculine sleutel), she said, with a distinct animation, “I imagine a big, giant key with decorations on it like the kind that would open a castle!!” I don’t know why she pictured that precisely, but I take the liberty of assuming that the key she imagined was a fella.

  So speakers of languages with gender, deep down inside, have a sense that objects are boys and girls. It is also documented that a Spanish speaker, if asked to imagine a table (la mesa) as a talking cartoon character, is likely to imagine the table’s voice being high and sweet because in their language table is feminine.

  However, in real life it is very, very rare that we go about imagining inanimate objects talking at all. In general, speakers of languages that assign gender to nou
ns do not on an everyday basis see inanimate objects as sexed “men” and “women.” The gender class of objects is something lying deep in their psyches, which we can tease out with careful experiments. However, it has nothing to do with the immediacy of daily experience. For anyone who has been close to a speaker of a language with gender, think about it—do they give any evidence of thinking of chairs and toothbrushes as “God’s creatures,” with a sex and the traits traditionally associated with it?

  Unless you have known some truly unusual people (likely fond of dropping acid), you will agree that the gender that their native grammar happens to assign to inanimate objects does not color their world view. If it does, it is in a way that would seem significant only to an academic psychologist plumbing exquisitely fine-grained niceties, hard to classify as a “world view” that would interest even the educated layman.

  Studies like this show that language does have some glimmers of effect on thought. But they do not support the more dramatic implications that suck the air out of a room when the textbook version of Sapir-Whorf is brought up. They bring to mind University of California linguist Paul Kay’s pithy observation about the whole business: “If anthropologists had not assumed that the people they went out to study have ‘world views’, would they have found them?” Neo-Whorfians reveal the truth: perceptual distinctions of a subtle, slight, and subconscious nature, not “world views.”

  There is nothing “cultural” about imagining dulcet-toned tables if forced to by someone supervising an experiment you signed up for, with said experiment being the only time in your life when you will ever imagine a table with the power of speech. Paul Kay and Willett Kempton, who have done research in the Neo-Whorfian tradition, readily acknowledge the simple truth: “If the differences in world view,” they write, “are to be interesting, they must be sizable. Minuscule differences are dull.”

  And yet, mainstream sources continue to flag the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in its grand old rendition as a going concern. “The significance of Whorf’s hypothesis lies less in its possible truth, and more in its continuing ability to generate thought and discussion on a problem which is central to the whole anthropological project,” Alan Barnard and Jonathan Spencer have it in the Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology. Or, as a widely used college textbook casually recites: “The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis therefore might suggest that English speakers can’t help paying more attention to differences between males and females than do the Palaung and less than do French or Spanish speakers.”

  But again, what is the value of an investigation classified as ever “might suggesting,” which inherently includes a hypothesis that Modern English is a philistine grammar, numb to the details that Old English channeled its speakers into noticing every day, such as the personal nature of emotion, or whether things are approaching us or sitting still?

  The idea that the world’s six thousand languages condition six thousand different pairs of cultural glasses simply does not hold water. The truly enlightened position is that, by and large, all humans, be they Australian Aborigines, Japanese urbanites, Kalahari hunter-gatherers, Cree Indians, Serbs, Greeks, Turks, Uzbeks, Amazonians, or Manhattanites in analysis, experience life via the mental equipment shared by all members of our species. No one is “primitive,” but just as important, no one is privileged over others with a primal connection to The Real.

  Five

  SKELETONS IN THE CLOSET

  WHAT HAPPENED TO ENGLISH

  BEFORE IT WAS ENGLISH?

  The final chapter in our new History of English takes us back before English was even English. It’s a trip we need to take, because it reinforces two lessons I have tried to get across in this book. First, there is nothing unique about English’s “openness” to words from other languages. Second, there is no logical conception of “proper” grammar as distinct from “bad” grammar that people lapse into out of ignorance or laziness.

  We’re going to go back before Old English, to Proto-Germanic, the ancestor to English and the other Germanic languages. It would appear that long before Something Happened to English, Something Happened to Proto-Germanic as well. There was a history of bastardy in English long before it was even a twinkle in Proto-Germanic’s eye.

  Froto- (I mean, Proto-) Germanic Sounded Strange As I noted earlier, Proto-Germanic was never written, but we can hypothesize what its words—and also a lot of its grammar—were like by deduction from its modern descendants. Proto-Germanic was one of several branches of an even earlier language linguists call Proto-Indo-European, which was reconstructed in the same way, by comparing all of its branches. As it happens, Proto-Germanic was a distinctly weird offshoot of Proto-Indo-European. There was something not quite right about it.

  For one thing, something had happened to its consonants. Where Proto-Indo-European words began with p, t, and k, for some reason in Proto-Germanic, they began with f, th, and h, respectively. We know this because only in Germanic languages today do the words come out that way, whereas in normal Indo-European languages they still have p, t, and k. Where Latin has pater, English has father—just as German has Vater, with the v pronounced “f,” etc. Why? Where Latin has tres, English has three. Why? Where Latin has canis, English has hound. Why?

  There are some sound changes that are so common you can almost guarantee that they will happen sooner or later in any language. For example, the standard Italian cappicola has morphed in Sicilian Italian to sound like this: “gabagul.” The g sound is a version of the k sound of the c’s in cappicola—say g and k to yourself and see how similar they are. In the same way, the b sound in the middle of “gabagul” is a version of the p sound. So k sounds become g sounds all the time, as do p sounds become b ones. It’s also typical for vowel sounds that carry no accent to drop off over time, such that “gabagul” doesn’t have the old -a on the end of cappicola.

  But p to f? Imagine a generation starting to say “fopcorn” instead of popcorn—weird. And even t to th: we pronounce the t in water more like a d because d is similar to t (try it). But it’s hard to imagine someone saying “thop” instead of top. Yet this is what happened in Proto-Germanic, and it passed down into all of today’s Germanic brood. As the way sounds change over time goes, k morphing into h is not all that odd, but p morphing into f and t morphing to th are not things your typical Indo-European language pulls. They aren’t utterly unheard-of: worldwide, for example, p’s becoming f’s is not something a linguist is flabbergasted by, any more than it is mesmerizingly counterintuitive that Americans make lemonade while Finns don’t (and they don’t—it’s weird; I couldn’t find any during six weeks in Helsinki). But p becoming f wasn’t the fashion within the Indo-European family. Why did the Germanic branch go its own way?

  The process by which Proto-Indo-European sounds regularly changed into these other ones was discovered, as it happens, by one of the Grimm brothers famous for collecting and penning fairy tales (Jacob), and is known to linguists as Grimm’s Law. Beyond our little circle, it should just be known as something weird about Germanic consonants.

  Now, as always, there are some people inclined to assume this was just an accident. Then, again as always, others seek an explanation, and those who do suppose that Proto-Germanic must represent a branch of Proto-Indo-European that was learned by speakers of some other language. Because foreigners typically render a second language with an accent—that is, they filter it partially through the sounds of their own language—we might have an explanation as to why p, t, and k were distorted so abruptly in Germanic while they weren’t in the Slavic, Greek, Celtic, or so many other branches of Indo-European.

  But what language would these foreigners have been speaking? Well, f, th, and h have something in common: all of them are “hissy” sounds. P, t, and k are clipped sounds, called stops by linguists (hissy sounds are fricatives). Crucially, Proto-Indo-European was quite poor in hissy sounds—all it had was s, which came out as z here and there. It would seem that whoever took up Proto-Germanic s
poke a language with a lot of hiss in it.

  Linguists and archaeologists assume that Proto-Germanic was being spoken in the last several centuries B.C. If we look for a language family other than Indo-European that was being spoken in or around Europe at this time, it happens that the Semitic family of the Middle East had good hissy languages.

  Today, Semitic’s most prominent representatives are Arabic and Hebrew. In the last centuries B.C., however, these were both obscure languages of small groups, and the shop-window Semitic representatives, used as lingua francas in the Middle East and/or beyond, were other ones. Akkadian is often mentioned via the names of its dialects Assyrian and Babylonian. Aramaic was once so entrenched as the language of note in the Middle East and beyond that it was the language of administration under the Persian Empire, run in Persia vastly eastward of where Aramaic had arisen, despite the native language of Persia’s rulers being, well, Persian, completely unrelated to Aramaic. It lives on today among small groups, termed, for one, Syriac. Akkadian had z, s, sh, ts, and an h sound that you made with your uvula. Aramaic at the time had sh, dz, ts, and h. Snaky sounds.

  So, just hypothetically, if speakers of languages like these wrapped their tongues around Proto-Germanic, we might expect that their rendition would have more hissy sounds than Proto-Indo-European passed down to it. But this alone can be so compelling only as a speculation. For one thing, one other Indo-European branch went hissy, too, apparently all by itself: Armenian, which occupies its branch all alone. Pater ( father) in Latin, hayr in Armenian. Cor (heart) in Latin, sirt in Armenian.

  Proto-Germanic Had Strange Verbs

  But there was something else about Proto-Germanic.

  To an English speaker it feels pretty normal that as often as not, we put a verb into the past by changing the vowel in it instead of adding -ed: see, saw; drink, drank; come, came; etc. And in Germanic in general, it is indeed normal: in German, those verbs are sehe, sah; trinke, trank; komme, kam. But in Indo-European, beyond Germanic, this is not normal at all.