Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages (26 page)

Before you rush to get rid of your psychiatrist and hire a grammarian instead, try this quick reality check. First, on a point of order, one should mention that no one fully understands the niceties of the biblical Hebrew verbal system. There are two main verbal forms in Hebrew, and the difference between them seems to depend on some elusive mix of both tense and what linguists call aspect—the distinction between completed actions (e.g., “I ate”) and ongoing actions (“I was eating”). But let’s even grant for the sake of argument that the Hebrew verb does not express the future tense, or any other tenses at all. Need this absence have any constraining effect on the speakers’ understanding of time, future, and eternity? Here is a verse from a delightful prophecy about impending doom, where a wrathful Jehovah promises his enemies imminent retribution:

Vengeance is mine, and recompense, at the time when their foot
shall slip
; for the day of their calamity is near, and the things to come
hasten
upon them.

(The Song of Moses, Deuteronomy 32:35)

There are two verbs in the Hebrew original, and as it happens, the first, “slip,” is in one of the two main verbal forms I have just mentioned, and the second, “hasten,” is in the other. In the English translation, these two verbs appear in two different tenses: “shall slip” and “hasten.” But while scholars can argue until vengeance comes home whether the difference between the Hebrew verbal forms expresses primarily aspect or tense, does any of this matter two hoots to the meaning of this verse? Would the meaning of the English translation change in any way if we changed the verb “slip” to the present tense: “at the time when their foot
slips
”? And can you detect any nebulousness about the concept of the future in the spine-chilling image of the things to come
hastening
upon the sinners?

Or think about it another way: when you ask someone, in perfect
English prose and in the present tense, something like “are you coming tomorrow?” do you feel your grasp of the concept of futurity is slipping? Your idea of time changing in manifold reciprocity? The hope and resilience of your spirit and the fabric of your humanity beginning to fail? If Jeremiah were alive today, he might say (or do I mean “he might have said”?): Even the stork in the heavens knows her times. And the turtledove, the swallow, and crane keep the time of their coming. But My scholars know not the ordinance of the World.

You may feel you have heard enough about linguistic relativity by now, but let me treat you to one final bit of burlesque. In 1996, the American journal
Philosophy Today
featured an article entitled “Linguistic Relativity in French, English, and German Philosophy” in which the author, William Harvey, asserted that the grammar of French, English, and German can explain the differences between the three philosophical traditions. For example, “English philosophy being largely, according to our thesis, determined by English grammar, we should find it to be, like the language, a fusion of the French and the German.” The point is then proved by showing that English theology (Anglican) is a cross between (French) Catholicism and (German) Protestantism. There are further gems. German’s case system “is part of the explanation for German philosophy’s orientation toward system construction,” whereas “if English thought is in some ways more open to ambiguity and lack of system, it might be attributed in part to the relative variability and looseness of English syntax.”

It might. It might also be attributable to the irregular shape of hot cross buns. More appropriately, however, it should be attributed to the habit of English-language journals to allow the likes of Mr. Harvey free range. (Incidentally, I know that hot cross buns are not particularly irregular. But then again, neither is English syntax particularly “variable and loose.” It is more rigid in its word order, for instance, than German.)

By far the most famous claim that Nietzsche never made was: “We have to cease to think if we refuse to do so in the prison-house of language.”
What he actually said was: “We cease to think if we do not want to do it under linguistic constraints” (
Wir hören auf zu denken, wenn wir es nicht in dem sprachlichen Zwange thun wollen
). But the English mistranslation has turned into a catchphrase, and as it happens, this phrase neatly summarizes everything that is so wrong about linguistic relativity. For there is one toxic fallacy that runs like quicksilver through all the arguments we have encountered so far, and this is the assumption that the language we happen to speak is a prison-house that limits the concepts we are able to understand. Whether it is the claim that the lack of a tense system constrains speakers’ understanding of time, or the allegation that when a verb and an object are fused together speakers do not understand the distinction between action and thing—what unites all these contentions is a premise that is as crude as it is false, namely that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” that the concepts expressed in a language are the same as the concepts its speakers are able to understand, and that the distinctions made in a grammar are the same as the distinctions the speakers are able to conceive.

It is barely comprehensible that such a ludicrous notion could have achieved such currency, given that so much contrary evidence screams in the face wherever one looks. Do ignorant folk who have never heard of “Schadenfreude” find it difficult to understand the concept of relishing someone else’s misfortune? Conversely, do Germans, whose language uses one and the same word for “when” and “if” (
wenn
), fail to understand the logical difference between what might happen under certain conditions and what will happen regardless? Did the ancient Babylonians, who used the same word (
arnum
) for both “crime” and “punishment,” not understand the difference? If so, why did they write thousands of legal documents, law codes, and court protocols to determine exactly what punishment should be given for what crime?

The list of examples could easily be extended. The Semitic languages require different verbal forms for the masculine and the feminine (“you eat” would have different forms depending on whether you are female or male), whereas English does not make gender distinctions on verbs. George Steiner concludes from this that “an entire anthropology of sexual equality is implicit in the fact that our verbs, in distinction from
those of Semitic tongues, do not indicate the gender of the agent.” Really? There are some languages that are so sexually enlightened that they make no gender distinctions even on pronouns, so that even “he” and “she” are fused into one unisex plastic synthetic creation. Which languages might these be? Turkish, Indonesian, and Uzbek, to name a few examples—not exactly languages of societies renowned for their anthropology of sexual equality.

Of course, no list of such blunders could be complete without George Orwell’s novel
1984
, where the political rulers have such faith in the power of language that they assume political dissent could be entirely eliminated if only all offending words could be expunged from the vocabulary. “In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” But why stop there? Why not abolish the word “greed” as a quick fix for the world’s economy, or do away with the word “pain” to save billions on aspirin, or confine the word “death” to the garbage can as an instant formula for universal immortality?

My ultimate aim, proclaimed earlier on, was to convince you that there might after all be something worth salvaging from the idea that our mother tongue can influence our thoughts and perceptions. This aim may now seem more like a suicide mission. But although the prospects for linguistic relativity do not look terribly promising right at the moment, the good news is that, having reached the intellectual nadir, things can only look up from here. In fact, the bankruptcy of Whorfianism has been beneficial for the progress of science, because by setting such an appalling example it has exposed the two cardinal errors that any responsible theory about the influence of language on thought must avoid. First, Whorf’s addiction to fantasies unfettered by facts has taught us that any alleged influence of a language on speakers’ minds must be demonstrated, not just assumed. One cannot just say “language X does things differently from language Y, and
hence
speakers of X must think differently from speakers of Y.” If there are reasons to suspect that speakers of X might think differently from speakers of Y, this has to be shown empirically.
In fact, even that is not quite enough, since when differences in thought patterns can be demonstrated, a convincing case still has to be made that it was really language that
caused
these differences, rather than other factors in the speakers’ cultures and environments.

The second major lesson from the errors of Whorfianism is that we must escape from the prison-house of language. Or rather, what we must escape from is the delusion that language is a prison-house for thought—that it constrains its speakers’ ability to reason logically and prevents them from understanding ideas that are used by speakers of other languages.

Of course, when I say that a language does not prevent its speakers from understanding any concepts, I do not mean that one can talk about any subject in any language in its current state. Try to translate a dishwasher operating manual into the language of a tribe from the Papuan highlands, and you will get stuck fairly quickly, since there are no words for forks, or plates, or glasses, or buttons, or soap, or rinsing programs, or flashing fault indicators. But it’s not the deep nature of the language that prevents the Papuans from understanding such concepts; it’s simply the fact that they are not acquainted with the relevant cultural artifacts. Given enough time, you could perfectly well explain all these things to them in their mother tongue.

Likewise, try to translate an introduction to metaphysics or to algebraic topology or, for that matter, many passages of the New Testament into our Papuan language, and you are unlikely to get very far, because you will not have words equivalent to most of the abstract concepts that are required. But again, you could create the vocabulary for such abstract concepts in any language, either by borrowing it or by extending the use of existing words to abstract senses. (European languages used both strategies.) These brave claims about the theoretical possibility of expressing complex ideas in any language are not merely wishful thinking; they have been proved countless times in practice. Admittedly, the experiment has not been conducted so often with dishwasher manuals or with metaphysics textbooks, but it has been conducted very often with the New Testament, which contains theological and philosophical arguments on extremely high levels of abstraction.

And if you are still tempted by the theory that the inventory of
ready-made concepts in our mother tongue determines the concepts we are able to understand, then just ask yourself how one would ever manage to learn any new concepts if that theory were true. Take this example. If you are not a professional linguist, the word “factivity” will probably not be part of your language. But does this mean that your mother tongue (ordinary English, that is) precludes you from understanding the distinction between “factive” and “non-factive” verbs? Let’s see. The verbs “realize” and “know,” for example, are called “factive,” because if you say something like “Alice realized that her friends had left,” you are implying that what Alice realized was a true fact. (So it would be very odd to say “Alice realized that her friends had left, but in fact they hadn’t.”) On the other hand, non-factive verbs such as “assume” do not imply a true fact: when you say “Alice assumed that her friends had left,” you can continue equally naturally with either “and indeed they had” or “but in fact they hadn’t.” So there we are. I have just explained a new and highly abstract concept to you, factivity, that was not part of your language before. Was your mother tongue a barrier?