Published: August 26, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html
Seventy years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a
short article that set in motion one of the trendiest intellectual
fads of the 20th century. At first glance, there seemed little about
the article to augur its subsequent celebrity. Neither the title,
"Science and Linguistics," nor the magazine, M.I.T.'s Technology
Review, was most people's idea of glamour. And the author, a chemical
engineer who worked for an insurance company and moonlighted as an
anthropology lecturer at Yale University, was an unlikely candidate
for international superstardom. And yet Benjamin Lee Whorf let loose
an alluring idea about language's power over the mind, and his
stirring prose seduced a whole generation into believing that our
mother tongue restricts what we are able to think.
In particular, Whorf announced, Native American languages impose on
their speakers a picture of reality that is totally different from
ours, so their speakers would simply not be able to understand some of
our most basic concepts, like the flow of time or the distinction
between objects (like "stone") and actions (like "fall"). For decades,
Whorf's theory dazzled both academics and the general public alike. In
his shadow, others made a whole range of imaginative claims about the
supposed power of language, from the assertion that Native American
languages instill in their speakers an intuitive understanding of
Einstein's concept of time as a fourth dimension to the theory that
the nature of the Jewish religion was determined by the tense system
of ancient Hebrew.
Eventually, Whorf's theory crash-landed on hard facts and solid common
sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any
evidence to support his fantastic claims. The reaction was so severe
that for decades, any attempts to explore the influence of the mother
tongue on our thoughts were relegated to the loony fringes of
disrepute. But 70 years on, it is surely time to put the trauma of
Whorf behind us. And in the last few years, new research has revealed
that when we learn our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain
habits of thought that shape our experience in significant and often
surprising ways.
Whorf, we now know, made many mistakes. The most serious one was to
assume that our mother tongue constrains our minds and prevents us
from being able to think certain thoughts. The general structure of
his arguments was to claim that if a language has no word for a
certain concept, then its speakers would not be able to understand
this concept. If a language has no future tense, for instance, its
speakers would simply not be able to grasp our notion of future time.
It seems barely comprehensible that this line of argument could ever
have achieved such success, given that so much contrary evidence
confronts you wherever you look. When you ask, in perfectly normal
English, and in the present tense, "Are you coming tomorrow?" do you
feel your grip on the notion of futurity slipping away? Do English
speakers who have never heard the German word Schadenfreude find it
difficult to understand the concept of relishing someone else's
misfortune? Or think about it this way: If the inventory of ready-made
words in your language determined which concepts you were able to
understand, how would you ever learn anything new?
SINCE THERE IS NO EVIDENCE that any language forbids its speakers to
think anything, we must look in an entirely different direction to
discover how our mother tongue really does shape our experience of the
world. Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed
out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy
maxim: "Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not
in what they may convey." This maxim offers us the key to unlocking
the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence
our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language
allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us
to think about.
Consider this example. Suppose I say to you in English that "I spent
yesterday evening with a neighbor." You may well wonder whether my
companion was male or female, but I have the right to tell you
politely that it's none of your business. But if we were speaking
French or German, I wouldn't have the privilege to equivocate in this
way, because I would be obliged by the grammar of language to choose
between voisin or voisine; Nachbar or Nachbarin. These languages
compel me to inform you about the sex of my companion whether or not I
feel it is remotely your concern. This does not mean, of course, that
English speakers are unable to understand the differences between
evenings spent with male or female neighbors, but it does mean that
they do not have to consider the sexes of neighbors, friends, teachers
and a host of other persons each time they come up in a conversation,
whereas speakers of some languages are obliged to do so.
On the other hand, English does oblige you to specify certain types of
information that can be left to the context in other languages. If I
want to tell you in English about a dinner with my neighbor, I may not
have to mention the neighbor's sex, but I do have to tell you
something about the timing of the event: I have to decide whether we
dined, have been dining, are dining, will be dining and so on.
Chinese, on the other hand, does not oblige its speakers to specify
the exact time of the action in this way, because the same verb form
can be used for past, present or future actions. Again, this does not
mean that the Chinese are unable to understand the concept of time.
But it does mean they are not obliged to think about timing whenever
they describe an action.
When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of
information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the
world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other
languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since
such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only
natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond
language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions,
associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.
BUT IS THERE any evidence for this happening in practice?
Let's take genders again. Languages like Spanish, French, German and
Russian not only oblige you to think about the sex of friends and
neighbors, but they also assign a male or female gender to a whole
range of inanimate objects quite at whim. What, for instance, is
particularly feminine about a Frenchman's beard (la barbe)? Why is
Russian water a she, and why does she become a he once you have dipped
a tea bag into her? Mark Twain famously lamented such erratic genders
as female turnips and neuter maidens in his rant "The Awful German
Language." But whereas he claimed that there was something
particularly perverse about the German gender system, it is in fact
English that is unusual, at least among European languages, in not
treating turnips and tea cups as masculine or feminine. Languages that
treat an inanimate object as a he or a she force their speakers to
talk about such an object as if it were a man or a woman. And as
anyone whose mother tongue has a gender system will tell you, once the
habit has taken hold, it is all but impossible to shake off. When I
speak English, I may say about a bed that "it" is too soft, but as a
native Hebrew speaker, I actually feel "she" is too soft. "She" stays
feminine all the way from the lungs up to the glottis and is neutered
only when she reaches the tip of the tongue.
In recent years, various experiments have shown that grammatical
genders can shape the feelings and associations of speakers toward
objects around them. In the 1990s, for example, psychologists compared
associations between speakers of German and Spanish. There are many
inanimate nouns whose genders in the two languages are reversed. A
German bridge is feminine (die Brücke), for instance, but el puente is
masculine in Spanish; and the same goes for clocks, apartments, forks,
newspapers, pockets, shoulders, stamps, tickets, violins, the sun, the
world and love. On the other hand, an apple is masculine for Germans
but feminine in Spanish, and so are chairs, brooms, butterflies, keys,
mountains, stars, tables, wars, rain and garbage. When speakers were
asked to grade various objects on a range of characteristics, Spanish
speakers deemed bridges, clocks and violins to have more "manly
properties" like strength, but Germans tended to think of them as more
slender or elegant. With objects like mountains or chairs, which are
"he" in German but "she" in Spanish, the effect was reversed.
In a different experiment, French and Spanish speakers were asked to
assign human voices to various objects in a cartoon. When French
speakers saw a picture of a fork (la fourchette), most of them wanted
it to speak in a woman's voice, but Spanish speakers, for whom el
tenedor is masculine, preferred a gravelly male voice for it. More
recently, psychologists have even shown that "gendered languages"
imprint gender traits for objects so strongly in the mind that these
associations obstruct speakers' ability to commit information to
memory.
Of course, all this does not mean that speakers of Spanish or French
or German fail to understand that inanimate objects do not really have
biological sex — a German woman rarely mistakes her husband for a hat,
and Spanish men are not known to confuse a bed with what might be
lying in it. Nonetheless, once gender connotations have been imposed
on impressionable young minds, they lead those with a gendered mother
tongue to see the inanimate world through lenses tinted with
associations and emotional responses that English speakers — stuck in
their monochrome desert of "its" — are entirely oblivious to. Did the
opposite genders of "bridge" in German and Spanish, for example, have
an effect on the design of bridges in Spain and Germany? Do the
emotional maps imposed by a gender system have higher-level behavioral
consequences for our everyday life? Do they shape tastes, fashions,
habits and preferences in the societies concerned? At the current
state of our knowledge about the brain, this is not something that can
be easily measured in a psychology lab. But it would be surprising if
they didn't.
The area where the most striking evidence for the influence of
language on thought has come to light is the language of space — how
we describe the orientation of the world around us. Suppose you want
to give someone directions for getting to your house. You might say:
"After the traffic lights, take the first left, then the second right,
and then you'll see a white house in front of you. Our door is on the
right." But in theory, you could also say: "After the traffic lights,
drive north, and then on the second crossing drive east, and you'll
see a white house directly to the east. Ours is the southern door."
These two sets of directions may describe the same route, but they
rely on different systems of coordinates. The first uses egocentric
coordinates, which depend on our own bodies: a left-right axis and a
front-back axis orthogonal to it. The second system uses fixed
geographic directions, which do not rotate with us wherever we turn.
We find it useful to use geographic directions when hiking in the open
countryside, for example, but the egocentric coordinates completely
dominate our speech when we describe small-scale spaces. We don't say:
"When you get out of the elevator, walk south, and then take the
second door to the east." The reason the egocentric system is so
dominant in our language is that it feels so much easier and more
natural. After all, we always know where "behind" or "in front of" us
is. We don't need a map or a compass to work it out, we just feel it,
because the egocentric coordinates are based directly on our own
bodies and our immediate visual fields.
But then a remote Australian aboriginal tongue, Guugu Yimithirr, from
north Queensland, turned up, and with it came the astounding
realization that not all languages conform to what we have always
taken as simply "natural." In fact, Guugu Yimithirr doesn't make any
use of egocentric coordinates at all. The anthropologist John Haviland
and later the linguist Stephen Levinson have shown that Guugu
Yimithirr does not use words like "left" or "right," "in front of" or
"behind," to describe the position of objects. Whenever we would use
the egocentric system, the Guugu Yimithirr rely on cardinal
directions. If they want you to move over on the car seat to make
room, they'll say "move a bit to the east." To tell you where exactly
they left something in your house, they'll say, "I left it on the
southern edge of the western table." Or they would warn you to "look
out for that big ant just north of your foot." Even when shown a film
on television, they gave descriptions of it based on the orientation
of the screen. If the television was facing north, and a man on the
screen was approaching, they said that he was "coming northward."
Read more….http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-
t.html
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