Through the Language Glass, Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

French follow in all our utterances exactly the order of thought, which is the order of Nature.” No wonder, then, that French can never be obscure. As the later thinker Antoine de Rivarol put it: “What is not clear may be English, Italian, Greek, or Latin” but “ce qui n’est pas clair n’est pas francais.”

Not all intellectuals of the world unite, however, in concurring with this analysis. Equally distinguished thinkers-strangely enough, mostly from outside France-have expressed different opinions. The renowned Danish linguist Otto Jespersen, for example, believed that English was superior to French in a whole range of attributes, including logic, for as opposed to French, English is a “methodical, energetic, business-like and sober language, that does not care much for finery and elegance, but does care for logical consistency.” Jespersen concludes: “As the language is, so also is the nation.”

Great minds have churned out even richer fare when advancing from the issue of how language reflects the character of its speakers to the grander question of how language influences the thought processes of its speakers. Benjamin Lee Whorf, to whom we shall return in a later chapter, captivated a whole generation when he taught that our habit of separating the world into objects (like “stone”) and actions (like “fall”) is not a true reflection of reality but merely a division thrust upon us by the grammar of European languages. According to Whorf, American Indian languages, which combine the verb and the object into one word, impose a “monistic view” on the universe, so their speakers would simply not understand our distinction between objects and actions.

A generation later, George Steiner reasoned in his 1975 book, After Babel, that the “conventions of forwardness in our syntax,” our “articulate futurity,” or, in other words, the existence of the future tense, is what gives us hope for the future, saves us from nihilism, even from mass suicide. “If our system of tenses was more fragile,” said Steiner, “we might not endure.” (He was clearly touched by prophetic inspiration, for dozens of languages that do not possess a future tense are becoming extinct every year.)

More recently, one philosopher has revolutionized our understanding of Tudor history by uncovering the real cause for Henry’s break with the pope. The Anglican revolution, he established, was not a result of the king’s desperate wish for an heir, as previously assumed, nor was it a cynical ploy to siphon off the Church’s wealth and property. Rather, the birth of Anglican theology ensued inevitably from the exigencies of the English language: English grammar, being halfway between French and German, compelled English religious thought inexorably toward a position halfway between (French) Catholicism and (German) Protestantism.

In their pronouncements on language, culture, and thought, it seems that big thinkers in their grandes ?uvres have not always risen much above little thinkers over their hors d’?uvre. Given such an unappetizing history of precedents, is there any hope of getting something savory out of the discussion? Once one has sifted out the unfounded and the uninformed, the farcical and the fantastic, is there anything sensible left to say about the relation between language, culture, and thought? Does language reflect the culture of a society in any profound sense, beyond such trivia as the number of words it has for snow or for shearing camels? And even more contentiously, can different languages lead their speakers to different thoughts and perceptions?

For most serious scholars today, the answer to all these questions is a resounding no. The dominant view among contemporary linguists is that language is primarily an instinct, in other words, that the fundaments of language are coded in our genes and are the same across the human race. Noam Chomsky has famously argued that a Martian scientist would conclude that all earthlings speak dialects of the same language. Deep down, so runs the theory, all languages share the same universal grammar, the same underlying concepts, the same degree of systemic complexity. The only important aspects of language, therefore, or at least the only ones worth investigating, are those that reveal language as an expression of innate human nature. Finally, there is a broad consensus that if our mother tongue influences the way we think at all, any such influence is negligible, even trivial-and that fundamentally we all think in the same way.

In the pages to follow, however, I will try to convince you, probably against your initial intuition, and certainly against the fashionable academic view of today, that the answer to the questions above is-yes. In this plaidoyer for culture, I will argue that cultural differences are reflected in language in profound ways, and that a growing body of reliable scientific research provides solid evidence that our mother tongue can affect how we think and how we perceive the world. But before you relegate this book to the crackpot shelf, next to last year’s fad-diet recipes and the How to Bond with Your Goldfish manual, I give you my solemn pledge that we will not indulge in groundless twaddle of any kind. We shall not be imposing monistic views on any universes, we shall not soar to such lofty questions as which languages have more “esprit,” nor shall we delve into the mysteries of which cultures are more “profound.” The problems that will occupy us in this book are of a very different kind.

In fact, the areas of culture we shall be concerned with belong to the most down-to-earth level of everyday life, and the aspects of language we shall encounter are on the most down-to-earth level of everyday speech. For it turns out that the most significant connections between language, culture, and thought are to be found where they are least expected, in those places where healthy common sense would suggest that all cultures and all languages should be exactly the same.

The high-level cultural differences that we immediately spot-in musical taste, sexual mores, dress code, or table manners-are in some sense superficial, precisely because we are so keenly aware of them: we know that pornography is just a matter of geography, and we are under no illusion that peoples around the globe share the same preferences in music or hold their forks in the same way. But culture can leave deeper marks exactly where we do not recognize it as such, where its conventions have been imprinted so indelibly on impressionable young minds that we grow up to take them for something else entirely.

If all these statements are to begin to make some sense, however, we first need to extend the concept of culture way beyond its normal use in everyday language. What is your first reaction when you hear the word “culture”? Shakespeare? String quartets? Curling the little finger on the teacup? Naturally, the way you understand “culture” depends on which culture you come from, as a quick glance through three lexicographic lenses will reveal:

Culture: cultivation, the state of being cultivated, refinement, the result of cultivation, a type of civilization.

Chambers English dictionary

Kultur: Gesamtheit der geistigen und kunstlerischen Errungen-schaften einer Gesellschaft.

(The totality of intellectual and artistic achievements of a society.)

Storig German dictionary

Culture: Ensemble des moyens mis en ?uvre par l’homme pour augmenter ses connaissances, developper et ameliorer les facultes de son esprit, notamment le jugement et le gout.

(The collection of means employed by man to increase his knowledge, develop and improve his mental faculties, notably judgment and taste.)

ATILF French dictionary

There is little, some would no doubt argue, that better confirms entrenched stereotypes about three great European cultures than the way they understand the concept of “culture” itself. Is the Chambers definition not the quintessence of Englishness? Rather amateurish in its noncommittal list of synonyms, politely avoiding any awkward definitions. And what could be more German than the German? Mercilessly thorough, overly intellectual, knocking the concept on the head with charmless precision. And as for the French: grandiloquent, hopelessly idealistic, and obsessed with le gout.

When anthropologists talk of “culture,” however, they use the word in a rather different sense from all of the definitions above, and in a far broader meaning. The scientific concept of “culture” emerged in Germany in the midnineteenth century but was first articulated explicitly by the English anthropologist Edward Tylor in 1871. Tylor started his seminal book, Primitive Culture, with the following definition, which is still quoted today in almost any introduction to the subject: “Taken in its wide ethnographic sense, [culture] is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits