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

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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?

Since there is no evidence that any language forbids its speakers from thinking anything, as Humboldt himself recognized two hundred years ago, the effects of the mother tongue cannot be sought in what different languages allow their speakers to think. But where then? Humboldt went on to say, in somewhat mystical terms, that languages nevertheless differ in what they “encourage and stimulate to do from their own inner force.” He seems to have had the right sort of intuition, but he was clearly struggling to pin it down and never managed to get beyond the metaphors. Can we turn his hazy imagery into something more transparent?

I believe we can. But to do so, we need to abandon the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the assumption that languages limit their speakers’ ability to express or understand concepts, and turn instead to a fundamental insight that can be dubbed the Boas-Jakobson principle.

FROM SAPIR-WHORF TO BOAS-JAKOBSON

We have already encountered the anthropologist Franz Boas as the person who introduced Edward Sapir to the study of Native American languages. In 1938, Boas made an acute observation about the role of grammar in language. He wrote that, in addition to determining the relationship between the words in a sentence, “grammar performs another important function. It determines those aspects of each experience that must be expressed.” And he went on to explain that such obligatory aspects vary greatly between languages. Boas’s observation was rather inconspicuously placed in a little section about “grammar” within a chapter entitled “Language” within an introduction to General Anthropology, and its significance does not seem to have been fully appreciated until two decades later, when the Russian-American linguist Roman Jakobson encapsulated Boas’s insight into a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” The crucial differences between languages, in other words, are not in what each language allows its speakers to express-for in theory any language could express anything-but in what information each language obliges it speakers to express.

Franz Boas, 1858-1942

Roman Jakobson, 1896-1982

Jakobson gives the following example. If I say in English, “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 are speaking French or German or Russian, I don’t have the privilege to equivocate, because I am obliged by the language to choose between voisin or voisine, Nachbar or Nachbarin, sosed or sosedka. So French, German, and Russian would compel me to inform you about the sex of my companion whether or not I felt it was your business. This does not mean, of course, that English speakers are oblivious to the differences between evenings spent with male or female neighbors. Nor does it mean that English speakers cannot express the distinction should they want to. It only means that English speakers are not obliged to specify the sex each time the neighbor is mentioned, while speakers of some languages are.

On the other hand, English does oblige you to specify certain bits of information that can be left to the context in some other languages. If I want to tell you in English about a dinner with my neighbor, I may not have to tell you 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 each time they use a verb, because the same verbal form can be used for past or present or future actions. Again, this does not mean that Chinese speakers are unable to express the time of the action if they think it is particularly relevant. But as opposed to English speakers, they are not obliged to do so every time.

Neither Boas nor Jakobson was highlighting such grammatical differences in relation to the influence of language on the mind. Boas was concerned primarily with the role that grammar plays in language, and Jakobson was dealing with the challenges that such differences pose for translation. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the Boas-Jakobson principle is the key to unlocking the actual effects of a particular language on thought. If different languages influence their speakers’ minds in varying ways, this is not because of what each language allows people to think but rather because of the kinds of information each language habitually obliges people to think about. When a language forces its speakers to pay attention to certain aspects of the world each time they open their mouths or prick up their ears, such habits of speech can eventually settle into habits of mind with consequences for memory, or perception, or associations, or even practical skills.

If this all still sounds a little too abstract, then the contrast between the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and the Boas- Jakobson principle can be brought into focus with another example. Chinese may seem to us rather lax in allowing its speakers to equivocate about the time of the action, but just try to imagine what a speaker of Matses from Peru might feel upon hearing about the incredibly crude and careless tense distinctions of English.