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

which yellow, light green, and light blue are treated as shades of one color, for instance, may seem to us almost incomprehensibly alien, but this division makes perfect sense within a system whose primary emphasis is on brightness rather than hue and where the main prismatic color to be set apart is red, so that all bright hues that have no tinge of redness naturally belong to the same concept.

But there are many other examples of the discrepancy between what is unnatural and what is merely unfamiliar. We will encounter one striking but little-known case in a later chapter: the concepts used to describe space and spatial relations. A more famous example is kinship terms. The language of the Yanomamo Indians in Brazil, for instance, appears to us incomprehensibly hazy, because it lumps together relatives of entirely different kinds under one concept. Using one and the same term, soriw?, for both cousins and brothers-in-law may already seem rather peculiar. But this is nothing compared with the unification of brothers and certain cousins: the Yanomamo term ?iw? makes no distinctions between one’s own brothers and the sons of a paternal uncle or of a maternal aunt! On the other hand, the Yanomamo would consider English unbearably vague in having just one term, “cousin,” which lumps together no less than four distinct type of relatives: amiw? (daughter of a paternal uncle or of a maternal aunt), ?iw? (son of paternal uncle or of maternal aunt), suw?biy? (daughter of maternal uncle or of paternal aunt), and soriw? (son of maternal uncle or of paternal aunt). There are even weirder systems of kinship terms, such as the one that anthropologists call the Crow system, in which the same concept is used for one’s own father and for some of one’s cousins (the sons of a paternal aunt). All these ways of dividing up one’s relatives have their own internal logic and coherence, but they nevertheless diverge radically from the categories that we find natural.

The freedom of culture is even more pronounced in the realm of grammar, since grammatical structures are by nature more abstract and, as we have seen, nature’s hold loosens considerably in the realms of abstraction. One striking aspect of the grammatical system that varies even among mainstream languages is the order of words. Japanese and Turkish, for instance, arrange words and grammatical elements in a way that seems to us perversely back to front. In The Unfolding of Language, I discussed examples such as the Turkish sentence Padi ah vezir-ini ordular-?-n?n ba -?-na getirdi, where a literal translation of each element-“Sultan vizier his troops his of head their to brought”-is almost as unenlightening to an English speaker as the Turkish itself. But for a Turkish speaker encountering English for the first time, the English arrangement-“the Sultan brought his vizier to the head of the troops”-would appear just as peculiar.

While the extent of variation among different grammars is not contested, there have been vociferous arguments about how to interpret it. The divergence between grammatical systems poses a particular challenge to the nativist idea of an innate universal grammar, because if the rules of grammar are meant to be coded in the genes, then one could expect the grammar of all languages to be the same, and it is then difficult to explain why grammars should ever vary in any fundamental aspects. One influential nativist response to this challenge has been the theory of “parametric variations” within universal grammar. According to this idea, the genetically coded grammar contains a few “parameters,” that is, a small set of preprogrammed options that can be thought of as “on-off” switches. Children who acquire their mother tongue, so the argument runs, do not need to learn its grammatical rules-their brains simply set the preprogrammed parameters according to the language they happen to be exposed to. Nativists have claimed that different settings of these few switches must account for the whole variation in grammatical structures across the world’s languages. The only freedom that different cultures are accorded is thus to decide on how to set each of the parameters: press a few switches one way and you’ll get the grammar of English, set a few switches the other way and you’ll get the grammar of Italian, and flip a few more and you’ll get the grammar of Japanese.

The theory of parameters has met with much criticism and some ridicule among non-nativists, who maintain that the scope of variation among the world’s languages is far too wide to be covered by a few parameters, and that from an evolutionary perspective it is exceedingly unlikely that a genetically determined grammar would emerge with such a set of switches (whatever for?). But the main argument against the theory of parameters is that it is merely a convoluted way to account for grammatical variation that can be explained far more simply and far more easily if one does not insist on believing that specific grammatical rules are innate.

In short, the adamant claims of nativists about the innateness of grammar have met with equally resolute opposition from culturalists. The controversy over grammar has thus produced a most impressive pile of paper over the last decades, and many a library shelf across the globe quietly groans under its burden. This book will not add much weight to the debate, because it concentrates on the concepts of language rather than on grammar. But there is one aspect of the grammatical system that nonetheless cries out for attention, precisely because it has- wholly unjustifiably-escaped the controversy almost entirely: the complexity of the grammatical system. On this subject, an eerie consensus prevails among linguists of all creeds and persuasions, who unite in severely underestimating the influence of culture.

5. Plato and the Macedonian Swineherd

Ask Joe the Plumber, Piers the Ploughman, or Tom the Piper’s Son what sort of languages the half-naked tribes in the Amazonian rain forest speak, and they will undoubtedly tell you that “primitive people speak primitive languages.” Ask professional linguists the same question, and they’ll say something quite different. Actually, you don’t even need to ask-they will tell you anyway: “All languages are equally complex.” This battle cry is one of the most oft avowed doctrines of the modern discipline of linguistics. For decades, it has been professed from lecterns across the globe, proclaimed in introductory textbooks, and preached at any opportunity to the general public.

So who is right: the man in the street or the congregation of linguists? Is the complexity of language a universal constant that reflects the nature of the human race, as linguists assert, or is it a variable that reflects the speakers’ culture and society, as Joe, Piers, and Tom assume? In the following pages, I’ll try to convince you that neither side has got it quite right, but that linguists have fallen into the more serious error.

PRIMITIVE LANGUAGES?

The linguist R. M. W. Dixon, who pioneered the serious study of Australian aboriginal languages, reports in his memoirs about the attitudes he encountered in the 1960s on his first field trips to North Queensland. Not far from Cairns, a white farmer asked him what exactly he was working on. Dixon explained he was trying to write a grammar of the local aboriginal language. “Oh, that should be pretty easy,” said the farmer. “Everyone knows that they haven’t got any grammar.” In Cairns itself, Dixon was interviewed about his activities on a local radio station. The astonished presenter could not believe his ears: “You really mean the Aborigines have a language? I thought it was just a few grunts and groans.” When Dixon protested that they had much more than grunts and groans, the presenter exclaimed, “But they don’t have more than about two hundred words, surely?” Dixon replied that on that very morning, he had collected from two informants over five hundred names just for animals and plants, so the overall vocabulary must be much larger. But the greatest shock for the presenter was reserved to the end, when he asked which well-known language the local lingo was most similar to. Dixon replied that some grammatical structures in the aboriginal language he was studying were more similar to Latin than to English.

Today, the attitudes that Dixon encountered in the sixties may no longer be so common, at least not in such a crass form. And yet there still seems to be a widespread belief on the street-even on very good streets-that the languages of the Aborigines in Australia, Indians in South America, Bushmen in Africa, and other simple peoples around the world are just as simple as their societies. As folk wisdom would have it, an undeveloped way of life is reflected in an undeveloped way of speaking, primitive Stone Age tools are indicative of primitive grammatical structures, nakedness and naivete are mirrored in infantile and inarticulate speech.