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

The Matses are a 2,500-strong tribe, and they live in the tropical rain forest along the Javari River, a tributary of the Amazon. Their language, which was recently described by the linguist David Fleck, compels them to make distinctions of mind-blowing subtlety whenever they report events. To start with, there are three degrees of pastness in Matses: you cannot just say that someone “passed by there”; you have to specify with different verbal endings whether this action took place in the recent past (roughly up to a month), distant past (roughly from a month to fifty years), or remote past (more than fifty years ago). In addition, the verb has a system of distinctions that linguists call “evidentiality,” and as it happens, the Matses system of evidentiality is the most elaborate that has ever been reported for any language. Whenever Matses speakers use a verb, they are obliged to specify-like the finickiest of lawyers-exactly how they came to know about the facts they are reporting. The Matses, in other words, have to be master epistemologists. There are separate verbal forms depending on whether you are reporting direct experience (you saw someone passing by with your own eyes), something inferred from evidence (you saw footprints on the sand), conjecture (people always pass by at that time of day), or hearsay (your neighbor told you he had seen someone passing by). If a statement is reported with the incorrect evidentiality form, it is considered a lie. So if, for instance, you ask a Matses man how many wives he has, unless he can actually see his wives at that very moment, he would answer in the past tense and would say something like daed iko h: “two there were [directly experienced recently].” In effect, what he would be saying is, “There were two last time I checked.” After all, given that the wives are not present, he cannot be absolutely certain that one of them hasn’t died or run off with another man since he last saw them, even if this was only five minutes ago. So he cannot report it as a certain fact in the present tense.

But finding the right verbal form for directly experienced events is child’s play compared with the hairsplitting precision required when you report an event that has only been inferred. Here, Matses obliges you to specify not just how long ago you assume the event occurred but also how long ago you made the inference. Suppose you saw wild pigs’ footprints on the ground somewhere outside the village, and you want to tell your friends that the animals passed by at that place. In English, saying “wild pigs passed by there” is exactly as much information as you have to specify. But in Matses, you have to reveal both how long ago you found out about the event (that is, how long ago you saw the footprints) and how long before that you think the event itself (pigs passing by) actually occurred. For example, if a short time ago you discovered tracks that were still fresh, you assume that the wild pigs passed by only shortly before you saw the tracks, so you would have to say:

kuen-ak-o- h

passed by-HAPPENED SHORTLY BEFORE EXPERIENCED-EXPERIENCED RECENTLY-they

“they passed by” (I found out a short time ago, it had happened shortly before that)

If a short time ago you discovered tracks that were already old, you would have to say:

kuen-nedak-o- h

passed by-HAPPENED LONG BEFORE EXPERIENCED-EXPERIENCED RECENTLY-they

“they passed by” (I found out a short time ago, it had happened long before that)

If a long time ago you discovered tracks that were still fresh, you would have to say:

kuen-ak-onda- h

passed by-HAPPENED SHORTLY BEFORE EXPERIENCED-EXPERIENCED LONG AGO-they

“they passed by” (I found out long ago, it had happened shortly before that)

And if a long time ago you discovered old tracks:

kuen-nedak-onda- h

passed by-HAPPENED LONG BEFORE EXPERIENCED-EXPERIENCED LONG AGO-they

“they passed by” (I found out long ago, it had happened long before that)

The Matses system is outlandish by any stretch of the imagination, and nothing quite as elaborate has yet been found elsewhere. Matses shows just how fundamentally languages can vary in the kinds of information they oblige their speakers to convey. But the weirdness of Matses also helps to clarify exactly where credible influences of language on thought may and may not be sought. One shudders to think what Whorf would have made of the Matses language if information about it had fallen into his hands, or, for that matter, what a Whorfian among the Matses would make of the unfathomable vagueness of English verbs. “I find it gratuitous to assume,” such a Matses sage would say, “that an American who knows only the English language and the cultural ideas of his own society can have a proper grasp of epistemology. English speakers simply would not be able to understand the difference between directly experienced events and merely inferred facts, because their language imposes on them a monistic view of the universe that blends the event with how it was experienced into one plastic synthetic creation.”

But this is gobbledygook, because we have no problems understanding the Matses distinctions, and if we are so minded we can easily express them in English: “I saw with my own eyes a short time ago that…,” “I inferred a long time ago that…,” “I guessed a very long time ago that…,” and so on. When this kind of information is felt to be particularly relevant, for instance in the witness box, English speakers routinely use such expressions. The only real difference between English and Matses, therefore, is that Matses forces its speakers to supply all this information whenever they describe an event, whereas English does not.

Whether the requirement to specify evidentiality translates into habits of mind that affect more than language is something that no one has yet studied empirically. But all the credible claims from recent years about the influence of a particular language on thought run on similar lines. No one (in his or her right mind) would argue nowadays that the structure of a language limits its speakers’ understanding to those concepts and distinctions that happen to be already part of the linguistic system. Rather, serious researchers have looked for the consequences of the habitual use from an early age of certain ways of expression. For example, does the need to pay constant attention to certain aspects of experience train speakers to be especially sensitive to certain details or induce particular types of memory patterns and associations? These are exactly the questions we shall explore in the next chapters.

For some critics, such as Steven Pinker, the fact that our mother tongue constrains neither our capacity to reason logically nor our ability to understand complex ideas is an irredeemable anticlimax. In his recent book, The Stuff of Thought, Pinker argues that since no one has ever managed to show that speakers of one language find it impossible, or even extremely difficult, to reason in a particular way that comes naturally to the speakers of another language, then any remaining effects of language on thought are mundane, unsexy, boring, even trivial. Obviously, what’s sexy is a matter of personal taste. But in what follows, I hope to show that while the actual effects of language on thought are very different from the wild and woolly claims of the past, they are far from boring, mundane, or trivial.

7. Where the Sun Doesn’t Rise in the East

DRESSED FOR DINNER

The Guugu Yimithirr language has one famous claim to fame, and is consequently celebrated throughout the wide world of trivial pursuits. The story runs roughly like this. In July 1770, Captain Cook’s Endeavour was grounded off the northeastern coast of Australia, near the mouth of a river soon to be named Endeavour, in a place that was later to become Cooktown. During the weeks when the ship was being repaired, Captain Cook and his crew made contact with the native population of the continent, both human and marsupial. With the former, relations were at first rather cordial. Cook writes in his diary on July 10, 1770: “In the A.M. four of the Natives came down to the Sandy point on the North side of the Harbour, having along with them a small wooden Canoe with Outriggers, in which they seem’d to be employed striking fish. They