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

bestow labels onto concepts as it pleases, but the concepts behind these labels have been formed by the dictates of nature. A great deal can be said for this partition. It is clear, simple, and elegant, it is intellectually and emotionally satisfying, and, last but not least, it has a respectable pedigree that extends all the way back to Aristotle, who wrote in the fourth century BC that, although the sounds of speech may differ across the races, the concepts themselves-or, as he called them, the “impressions of the soul”-are the same for the whole of mankind.

Are there any possible objections to this map? Just one: it bears scant resemblance to reality. The neat border we have just marked may be a pretty work of wishful cartography, but unfortunately it does not represent the actual power relations on the ground with any accuracy. For in practice, culture not only controls the labels, but embarks on incessant raids across the border into what ought to be the birthright of nature. While the distinction between some concepts, such as “cat” and “dog,” may be delineated so clearly by nature that it is largely immune to culture’s onslaught, cultural conventions do manage to meddle in the internal affairs of many other concepts, in ways that sometimes upset plain common sense. Just how deeply culture penetrates the land of concepts, and how difficult it can be to come to terms with this state of affairs, is something that will become clearer in the following chapters. But for the moment, we can start with a quick reconnaissance tour of a few of culture’s strongholds across the border.

Consider first the realm of abstraction. What happens when we move away from simple physical objects like cats or birds or roses to abstract concepts such as “victory,” “fairness,” or “Schadenfreude”? Have such concepts also been decreed by nature? I once knew someone who enjoyed saying that the French and the Germans have no mind. What he meant was that neither of their languages had a word for the English “mind,” and he was right in one sense: neither French nor German has a single concept, with a single label, that covers exactly the range of meanings of the English concept “mind.” If you ask a bilingual dictionary how to translate “mind” into French, the dictionary will explain patiently that it depends on the context. You will be given a list of possibilities, such as:

esprit (peace of mind = tranquillite d’esprit)

tete (it’s all in the mind = c’est tout dans la tete)

avis (to my mind = a mon avis)

raison (his mind is going = il n’a plus toute sa raison)

intelligence (with the mind of a two-year-old = avec l’intelligence d’un enfant de deux ans)

Conversely, English does not have a single concept that covers exactly the range of meanings of the French esprit, as Bertrand Russell so spiritedly observed. Again, a dictionary would give a long list of different English words as possible translations, for instance:

wit (avoir de l’esprit = to have wit)

mood (je n’ai pas l’esprit a rire = I’m in no mood for laughing)

mind (avoir l’esprit vif = to have a quick mind)

spirit (esprit d’equipe = team spirit)

So concepts like “mind” or “esprit” cannot be natural in the way that “rose” or “bird” are; otherwise they would have been identical in all languages. As early as the seventeenth century, John Locke recognized that in the realm of abstract notions each language is allowed to carve up its own concepts-or “specific ideas,” as he called them-in its own way. In his 1690 Essay concerning Human Understanding, he proved the point through the “great store of words in one language which have not any that answer them in another. Which plainly shows that those of one country, by their customs and manner of life, have found occasion to make several complex ideas, and given names to them, which others never collected into specific ideas.”

Nature’s first concession to culture has not come as too much of a wrench, for even if the neat borderline between culture and nature has to be redrawn somewhat, the notion that cultural conventions are involved in determining the shape of abstract concepts is not seriously at odds with our basic intuition. After all, if instead of the story about the Ziftish concepts “bose” and “rird,” the eighteenth-century travelogue reported that Ziftish didn’t have a single word that corresponds to the English concept “fair” and that in lieu of it Ziftish uses the concept “just” in some contexts and “kind” in other contexts, our common sense would hardly be mobilized to march in protest.

But things quickly become less cozy when it transpires that culture interferes not just in the realm of abstraction but also in the simplest concepts of everyday discourse. Take pronouns such as “I,” “you,” or “we.” Could anything be more elementary or more natural than these? Of course, no one who is aware of the existence of foreign languages would be under the illusion that the labels for such concepts are dictated by nature, but it seems unimaginable that any language would not have the actual concepts themselves. Suppose, for instance, you continue thumbing through the travelogue and come across the claim that Ziftish doesn’t have a word that corresponds to English “we.” Instead, the author alleges, Ziftish has three distinct pronouns: kita, which means “just the two of us, me and you,” tayo, which means “me and you and someone else,” and kami, which means “me and someone else, but not you.” The author relates how tickled the Ziftians were to hear that for these three entirely different concepts English uses just one little word, a wee “we.” You may dismiss the system our chimerical author has invented as a lame joke, but Tagalog speakers in the Philippines would disagree, because this is exactly how they speak.

The strain on plain common sense is only just beginning, though. One might naturally expect that at least the concepts that describe simple physical objects would all be the prerogative of nature. As long as we restrict ourselves to cats, dogs, and birds, this expectation is in fact largely borne out, because these animals are so distinctly shaped by nature. But the moment nature shows the slightest doubt in its incision, culture is quick to pounce. Consider the parts of the human body, for instance. Among the simple physical things that matter most to our lives, it hardly gets any simpler or more physical than hands and toes and fingers and necks. And yet many of these allegedly distinct body parts were not delineated by nature with much zeal. The arm and the hand, for example, are the body’s equivalent to the continents Asia and Europe-are they really one thing or two? It turns out that the answer depends on the culture you grew up in. There are many languages, my mother tongue included, that treat the hand and the arm as one concept and use the same label for both. If a Hebrew speaker tells you that when she was a child she got an injection in her hand, this is not because her doctors were sadistic, but simply because she is thinking in a language that doesn’t make the distinction as a matter of course, so she has forgotten to use a different word for that particular part of the hand that English curiously insists on calling an “arm.” On the other arm, there was a fairly long period when my daughter, who had learned that yad in Hebrew meant “hand,” objected loudly whenever I used yad to refer to the arm, even when we spoke in Hebrew. She would point at the arm and explain to me in indignant tones: ze lo yad (it’s not yad), ze arm (it’s “arm”)! The fact that “hand” and “arm” are different things in one language but the same thing in another is not so easy to grasp.

There are also languages that use the same word for “hand” and “finger,” and a few languages, such as Hawaiian, even manage with using just one concept for the three distinct English body parts “arm,” “hand,” and “finger.” Conversely, English lumps together certain body parts that speakers of other languages treat as distinct concepts. Even after two decades of speaking English, I still sometimes get tied up in knots with the neck. Someone starts talking about his neck, and I naturally take him at his word and assume he really means his neck- the part of the body that in my mother tongue is called tsavar. But after a while it transpires that he hasn’t been talking about the neck at all. Or rather, he was talking about the neck, but he didn’t mean the tsavar. What he actually meant was oref, the “back of the neck,” that body part which English most carelessly and inconsiderately conjoins with the front of the neck into one concept. In Hebrew, the neck (tsavar) refers only to the front part of this tube, whereas the back part, oref, has an entirely unrelated name and is considered just as distinct as the English “back” is from “belly” or “hand” is from “arm.”