When in French

by Lauren Collins

  After nearly an hour of debate, the committee was still torn.

  “The truth is, in the field of economy I don’t see a systematic use of this expression,” one of the members admitted.

  Someone attempted a last-ditch effort to solidify support for sans changement.

  “It’s a good suggestion, but it would need to be agreed upon by the majority of the members of the commission,” the chairman ruled. “I think it is a subject we can revisit. Does everyone agree to move on to other terms?”

  Most of the other words passed muster fairly easily. “Hot desking,” in a matter of minutes, morphed to partage de bureau. “Fun business”—perhaps the Jerry Lewis of economics terms, cherished abroad but ignored at home—was christened travail amusant. Straightforwardly enough, “offshoring” became délocalisation. But its entourage of spin-offs—“onshoring,” “homeshoring,” “nearshoring”—gave the committee pause. The working group had suggested that “nearshoring,” for example, be rendered délocalisation dans un pays proche.

  “The question is, what is the definition of ‘close’?” one of the members asked. “The concept of ‘close’ is not very well-defined.”

  It had been three hours. The committee briefly adjourned. During the break, the man to my right introduced himself. He was Vincent, a linguistics professor from Lyon. His specialty, it turned out, was lexical blending: the formation of words like fugly and spork.

  Every compound or blended word, he explained, demonstrates what is called “headedness”—one of its elements overpowers the other with regard to how the word will be defined. In English, “rightheadedness” prevails: a photosafari is a safari, not a photograph. French generally works the other way around, so that carburéacteur (carburant + réacteur) is jet fuel, rather than a fueled jet.

  Maybe this had something to do with why the committee was getting so hung up, why it was unable to see the shores for the nears. French, I felt, didn’t need to be able to say “nearshoring.” The term existed because it could, because the blocks were there and someone had built it. Why make a plumcot unless you’ve got a bunch of plums on hand?

  When the meeting resumed, we turned to the chemistry terms. Adiabatique, diathermane, différence de potentiel électrique de cellule. I relaxed, letting the words wash over me, a language within a language, once again obscure.

  “Madame Collins?” I heard the chairman say.

  He was asking for my opinion as to whether absorption modulée en pression did justice to the term “pressure swing absorption,” a technique for purifying gas.

  I straightened my back, tapped my microphone, and looked out at the group.

  “Je n’en ai aucune idée,” I said, confessing, in irreproachable French, that I hadn’t the slightest idea.

  • • •

  OLIVIER SAID TO MEET HIM at the hardware store, the first door on the south after turning east at the light. When I got there, he had already bought what he needed. It was raining, nearly time for lunch. We walked a few blocks and ducked into an indoor market. The northern aisle was full of vendors: a butcher; a charcutier; a fishmonger, his wares laid out on ice. We stopped and called to the southwest side of the counter, where he was filleting a perch.

  “Five hundred grams of smoked salmon, please?”

  “Ça fait vingt-trois quarante,” the fishmonger yelled back, indicating that the order would be twenty-three francs and forty centimes.

  Olivier extracted two twenties and a five-franc coin from the ziplock bag that served as his wallet.

  “Pretty sure he said vingt-trois quarante,” I said.

  “It’s trente-trois quarante,” Olivier replied, handing over the cash.

  The fishmonger counted the money and pushed one of the twenties back over the counter.

  “Did I just school you in French?” I blurted out, my American-volume gloat turning the heads of Saturday-morning matrons, with their bouffants and little pushcarts.

  My sense of satisfaction was short-lived.

  “Yeah,” Olivier admitted, before reminding me, “Because I’m deaf in my west ear.”

  That, at least, is how the story might go in Guugu Yimithirr, a language spoken by about a thousand people in Far North Queensland, the province that sticks up like a cowlick from the crown of Australia’s coast. Captain Cook made the first written record of Guugu Yimithirr after his ship, the Endeavor, ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef in June 1770, stranding him and his crew for several months at the mouth of what is now the Endeavor River.

  On the morning of July 23, Cook sent some men out into the countryside to gather greens. One of them, he recalled in his diary, “stragled from the rest, and met with 4 of the Natives by a fire,” on which they were broiling a fowl and the hind leg of a turtle. The man went and sat with them. After a while, Cook wrote, “they suffer’d him to go away without offering the least insult, and perceiving that he did not go right for the Ship they directed him which way to go.” What is incidental in Cook would resurface, two centuries later, as a critical linguistic discovery: speakers of Guugu Yimithirr, orienting themselves exclusively via the cardinal directions, possess exceptional spatial skills.

  Languages can encode space in three ways: geocentrically, in which the frame of reference is fixed (“I am south of the fire”); intrinsically, in which the frame of reference depends on an object (“I am behind the fire”); and egocentrically, in which the frame of reference aligns with the viewer (“I am to the left of the fire”). Most languages make use of at least two of them. English avails itself of all three, so that an English speaker can say, “Walk south on Main Street, continue in front of the library, and turn right into the park.” Guugu Yimithirr, however, is among a handful of languages that offer only the geocentric option. It requires every speaker, whenever he wants to communicate the slightest fact about location, which is to say basically anytime he wants to communicate anything at all, to place himself on a grid. Studies of Guugu Yimithirr speakers have shown that their senses of direction are more or less unshakable. Plunk one down in heavy fog, turn him loose in a forest, shut him up in a windowless room, lead him into a cave—he’ll still be able to position himself as truly as if he were following a GPS. Several decades after the fact, an elderly man recounted to a researcher his experience of getting caught in a storm, capsizing his boat, and having to swim several miles to the shore. The sharks that menaced him, he recalled, were swimming north.

  The existence of Guugu Yimithirr is among the most persuasive exhibits for the argument that language influences culture. By forcing its speakers to constantly articulate their whereabouts, it effectively turns their brains into compasses. Linguistic universalists have objected strenuously to this conclusion, contending that it confuses causation with correlation—John McWhorter writes that it’s akin to saying “Tribes with no words for clothing do not wear clothes.” They dismiss the superb navigational abilities displayed by speakers of Guugu Yimithirr as a function of their environment: if you live on flat land in the bush, without many landmarks, it makes sense that you would rely on cardinal directions. But plenty of people who live in similar environments use egocentric orienteering systems. And children are able to master geocentric ones at an early age, before they’ve had much exposure to any landscape but the lap and the crib.

  Guy Deutscher explains that, while English speakers perceive two hotel rooms across a hall from each other as exact replicas (both bathroom doors on the left, the vanity behind them, the soap on the left-hand ledge), speakers of Guugu Yimithirr experience them as diametrically reversed (everything turned north-side-south). “Does this all mean that we and speakers of Guugu Yimithirr sometimes remember ‘the same reality’ differently?” he asks. Guugu Yimithirr, he concludes, “must be a crucial factor in bringing about the perfect pitch for directions and the corresponding patterns of memory that seem so weird and unattainable to us.”

  One way
to settle the debate, once and for all, would be to raise a bunch of Los Angelenos or Tokyoites from birth in Guugu Yimithirr. That is not going to happen, for ethical and practical reasons. But a number of experiments devised in recent years have illustrated the connection between features of languages and the different ways that their speakers behave. Taken in the aggregate, the work of the neo-Whorfians, as they’re known, suggests that language can shape culture, rather than merely reflecting it, resurrecting the reputation of their namesake from the pauper’s grave in which Chomsky laid it.

  • • •

  IT WAS A SUNDAY AFTERNOON, hot and still. In the summer, most cities swell with bandstands and fruit carts and air-conditioner window units, dripping on the brims of the baseball caps of packs of tourists. But Geneva felt drained in a way that suggested swift evacuation, as though someone had just pulled the plug of a bathtub, leaving behind a few damp, tottering toys.

  I went to the park. Not much was happening: a retiree practiced tai chi; some teenagers wafted pot smoke and Swiss rap. (The leading Swiss rapper, Stress, had a business degree and was a former employee of Procter & Gamble. “Switzerland, Switzerland, mais qu’est-ce qui se passe,” went the refrain of his hit song “Fuck Blocher,” which protested the election of the industrialist Christoph Blocher to the Swiss Federal Council.) Spotting a wide patch of grass, I pitched my canvas chair near a footpath. It squired pedestrians under oaks and past rhododendrons toward the granite eminences of the Reformation Wall: a sixteen-foot-tall John Calvin, Roger Williams in a cockel hat.

  I sat down and tipped off my shoes, crossing my legs at the knees, so that the top one formed a little shelf, my foot dangling off. I had a cold bottle of water and Bonjour Tristesse, Françoise Sagan’s novel of estival ennui. It was peaceful, if nothing else. “He was following the coast in a little sailboat and keeled over in front of our creek,” I read. “I helped him get his things together and, amid our laughs, I learned that his name was Cyril, that he was a law student spending his vacation with his mother in a neighboring villa.” The Mediterranean seemed very far away.

  I was just getting into Cyril—“He had a Latin face, very brown, very open, with something stable, something protective, that pleased me”—when I noticed a less alluring character—he had red shorts and flip-flops—walking in the direction of the grass. I went back to reading, underlining the words I didn’t know. L’étourdissement—dizziness. Les soupirs—sighs. The man continued on the footpath until it delivered him just a few inches in front of where I was sitting. Before I knew what was happening, he had reached out and grabbed my foot. He was squeezing it, like a lemon.

  I was dumbfounded. The man walked on, unscolded, as I tried to formulate a riposte. I could hear the curses, but they were just beyond reach. I felt as though I were trawling around the bottom of a messy purse for a missing set of keys.

  According to tradecraft, a person will always reveal his native language at the moment of orgasm. This was very much the opposite situation. I was unnerved both by the bizarreness of the incident and by the fact that I hadn’t, in the heat of the moment, instinctively blurted out some expression of my disgust. The afternoon curdled, I trudged back to the apartment, conjuring up the insults I would scream, the remonstrances I would let rain, the next time a stranger touched my foot.

  Later, I would look back on that day almost with fondness. I hadn’t known to whom I was speaking, and thus how to speak. Taken by surprise, I was unable to decide whether my primary audience was my assailant, the public, or myself. My silence, I realized, hadn’t sprung from a deficit. I’d been paralyzed not by a lack of options, a dearth of language, but by an embarrassment of them.

  • • •

  THE STATUE OF LIBERTY HAS a rosebud mouth and taut breasts. Why is she a woman? Inspired by her knowledge of gendered nouns in her native Russian, Lera Boroditsky, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego, analyzed 765 artworks—personifying such abstract concepts as justice, time, and love—created since 1200 by French, German, Italian, and Spanish artists. She found that 78 percent of the time, the gender of the figure matched its grammatical gender in the artist’s native language. Liberty, in other words, is likely to be a woman when it corresponds to a feminine noun, la liberté, and its creator is French. Boroditsky summarized the phenomenon as “grammar quite literally carved in stone.” She and her collaborator acknowledged that they hadn’t proved causation, but even in cases for which the cultural precedent was weak, there was a strong correlation between the gender of a word and its representation. In Laurent de La Hyre’s Allégorie de la géométrie, math is a raven-tressed babe.

  In recent years, neo-Whorfian researchers have begun to chip away at Chomsky’s universal grammar, redeeming some of linguistic relativism’s less outlandish ideas. “Is anybody born with the concept of a carburetor, or a bureaucrat?” Boroditsky asks. In another test, she instructed speakers of German and Spanish to think about a bridge—die Brücke, a feminine noun, in the former and el puente, a masculine one, in the latter—and to describe it in three adjectives. The Germans tended to use stereotypically feminine words such as beautiful, fragile, and elegant, while the Spanish favored masculine ones such as sturdy, towering, and strong. Boroditsky then created a nonsense language called Gumbuzi, in which all nouns were either “oosative” (indicated by the prefix oos-) or “soupative” (indicated by the prefix sou-), and taught it to native English speakers. The oosative/soupative distinction extended to both living beings—males fell into one category; females into the other—and inanimate objects. Half of Boroditsky’s subjects learned that pots, pens, spoons, giants, and boys were oosative and that pans, forks, ballerinas, and pencils were soupative, while the other half learned exactly the opposite. The former group, when quizzed, described the first set of objects as masculine and the second as feminine, while the latter group did the reverse. After only twenty minutes of speaking Gumbuzi, they were demonstrating Whorfian effects.

  The neo-Whorfians make a compelling case in the field of color. In 1858 William Gladstone noticed that there was something off in Homer’s depiction of the natural world. Why, he wondered, had Homer described blood as black? Why were oxen and the sea alike “wine-dark”? Why had he failed entirely to mention the color of the sky? The Greeks, he determined, must have seen color in a quantitatively different way. His theory set off a century of inquiry into the naturalness, or lack thereof, of categories of color. Some of his followers concluded that the Greeks must have been color-blind. Some researchers accepted eyesight as an explanation for perceptual differences; others argued that everyone’s vision was equal and that the muted palettes of Homer and other “primitive peoples” were a result of vague vocabularies. The idea that the rainbow might be arbitrarily constructed by language—that each language, working with the same spectrum, might divide it into different stripes—enjoyed a vogue during the heyday of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but soon faded. In 1969 Brent Berlin and Paul Kay proposed their basic color theory, which held that, as languages evolve, they add color terms in a predictable sequence of seven stages, beginning with dark and light and culminating in the acquisition of purple, pink, orange, and gray.

  Berlin and Kay’s theory entered into dogma, but although it was supposedly universal, it was based on a culturally specific assumption that color was a natural property of the physical world. As Aneta Pavlenko explains, some languages—Bellonese, Mursi, Pirahã, Warlpiri, Kalam, Yélî Dnye—“do not encode color as an abstract dimension independent of other properties of material objects.” Instead they focus on other characteristics, assimilating hue into distinctions of pattern, ripeness, brightness, translucence, humidity, shape, or location. A banana might be “ripe” but not “yellow,” even if yellow is implied in its ripeness. When asked by scientists to identify color samples, Mursi speakers, unsure of their responses, said not “I don’t know the name of that color” but “There’s no such beast.” In The Bilingual
Mind, Pavlenko makes a breathtaking argument: “These distinct outcomes suggest that categorical perception of colors, cups, and cattle—and, for that matter, snow and ice—is shaped by our engagement with the material world, with lexical categories serving as a means of focusing selective attention on the relevant distinctions.” Perhaps the stubborn belief of her overwhelmingly white, male, English-speaking colleagues in the naturalness of such categories, she suggests, is a Whorfian effect in itself.

  In 2007 scientists from Stanford, MIT, and UCLA asked Russian and English speakers to sit in front of a computer screen, on which they presented various pictures of three squares. In each picture the squares were arranged in a triangle: one on top, the remaining pair below. They were all blue, spanning twenty gradations from what an English speaker would probably describe as robin’s-egg blue to a midnight shade. The color of one of the bottom squares always matched the top square, while the other bottom square was a different shade. The scientists instructed the subjects to hit a button as soon as they could identify the matching pair.

  In Russian, you can’t call the sky “blue.” The language obliges its speakers to make a distinction between siniy (dark blue) and goluboy (light blue), so that what is in English one color becomes in Russian two. This is the sort of quirk that dinner-party linguists love to muse about, but the researchers were able to measure its effect on visual perception in an objective way. Russian speakers, they found, could distinguish between dark and light shades of blue 10 percent faster than English speakers. (Universalists will point out that the difference is only 124 milliseconds, in the course of making an argument that typically proceeds from “There are no Whorfian effects” to “Okay, there are, but they’re really small.”) To test whether this edge was due to language, the researchers then asked the subjects to perform the same exercise while memorizing an eight-digit number. With their language processing disrupted, Russian speakers were no better at the color-sorting task than their English peers. The color of the sea depends, to some extent, on the language we speak.