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

steps forward” or “bend backward” would be the height of absurdity.

PERFECT PITCH FOR DIRECTIONS

What I have reported so far are just facts. They may seem strange, and it is certainly strange that they were discovered only so recently, but the evidence collected by many researchers in different parts of the world no longer leaves room for doubt about their veracity. We venture onto riskier ground, however, when we move from the facts about language to their possible implications on the mind. Different cultures certainly make people speak about space in radically different ways. But does this necessarily mean that the speakers also think about space differently? By now red lights should be flashing and we should be on Whorf alert. It should be clear that if a language doesn’t have a word for a certain concept, that does not necessarily mean its speakers cannot understand this concept.

Indeed, Guugu Yimithirr speakers are perfectly able to understand the concepts of left and right when they speak English. Ironically, it seems that some of them even entertained Whorfian notions about the alleged inability of English speakers to understand cardinal directions. John Haviland reports how he was once working with an informant on translating traditional Guugu Yimithirr tales into English. One story concerned a lagoon that lies “west of the Cooktown airport”-a description that most English speakers would find perfectly natural and understand perfectly well. But his Guugu Yimithirr informant suddenly said: “But white fellows wouldn’t understand that. In English we’d better say, ‘to the right as you drive to the airport.’ ”

Instead of searching in vain for how the lack of egocentric coordinates might constrain the Guugu Yimithirr’s intellectual horizons, we should turn to the Boas-Jakobson principle and look for the difference in what languages oblige their speakers to convey rather than in what they allow them to convey. In this particular case, the relevant question is what habits of mind might develop in speakers of Guugu Yimithirr because of the necessity to specify geographic directions whenever spatial information is to be communicated.

When the question is framed in this way, the answer appears inescapable, but no less startling for all that. In order to speak Guugu Yimithirr, you need to know where the cardinal directions are at each and every moment of your waking life. You need to know exactly where the north, south, west, and east are, since otherwise you would not be able to impart the most basic information. It follows, therefore, that in order to be able to speak such a language, you need to have a compass in your mind, one that operates all the time, day and night, without lunch breaks or weekends.

And as it so happens, the Guugu Yimithirr have exactly this kind of an infallible compass. They maintain their orientation with respect to the fixed cardinal directions at all times. Regardless of visibility conditions, regardless of whether they are in thick forest or on an open plain, whether outside or indoors, whether stationary or moving, they have a spot-on sense of direction. Stephen Levinson relates how he took Guugu Yimithirr speakers on various trips to unfamiliar places, both walking and driving, and then tested their orientation. In their region, it is rarely possible to travel in a straight line, since the route often has to go around bogs, mangrove swamps, rivers, mountains, sand dunes, forests, and, if on foot, snake-infested grassland. But even so, and even when they were taken to dense forests with no visibility, even inside caves, they always, without any hesitation, could point accurately to the cardinal directions. They don’t do any conscious computations: they don’t look at the sun and pause for a moment of calculation before saying “the ant is north of your foot.” They seem to have perfect pitch for directions. They simply feel where north, south, west, and east are, just as people with perfect pitch hear what each note is without having to calculate intervals.

Similar stories are told about Tzeltal speakers. Levinson relates how one speaker was blindfolded and spun around over twenty times in a darkened house. Still blindfolded and dizzy, he pointed without problem at the direction of “true downhill.” A woman was taken into the market town for medical treatment. She had rarely if ever been in that town before, and certainly never in the house where she was staying. In the room, the woman spotted an unfamiliar contraption, a sink, and asked her husband: “Is the hot water in the uphill tap?”

The Guugu Yimithirr take this sense of direction entirely for granted and consider it a matter of course. They cannot explain how they know the cardinal directions, just as you cannot explain how you know where in front of you is and where left and right are. One thing that can be ascertained, however, is that the most obvious candidate, namely the position of the sun, is not the only factor they rely on. Several people reported that when they traveled by plane to very distant places such as Melbourne, more than a three-hour flight away, they experienced the strange sensation that the sun did not rise in the east. One person even insisted that he had been to a place where the sun really did not rise in the east. This means that the Guugu Yimithirr’s orientation does fail them when they are displaced to an entirely different geographic region. But more importantly, it shows that in their own environment they rely on cues other than the position of the sun, and that these cues can even take precedence. When Levinson asked some informants if they could think of clues that would help him improve his sense of direction, they volunteered such hints as the differences in brightness of the sides of trunks of particular trees, the orientation of termite mounds, wind directions in particular seasons, the flights of bats and migrating birds, the alignment of sand dunes in the coastal area.

But we are only just beginning, because the sense of orientation that is required to speak a Guugu Yimithirr- style language has to extend further than the immediate present. What about relating past experiences, for instance? Suppose I ask you to describe a picture you saw in a museum a long time ago. You would probably describe what you see in your mind’s eye, say the milkmaid pouring the milk into a bowl on a table, the light coming from the window on the left and illuminating the wall behind her, and so on. Or suppose you are trying to remember a dramatic event from many years ago, when you capsized a sailing boat off the Great Barrier Reef. You jumped out to the right just before the boat rolled over to the left, and as you were swimming away you saw a shark in front of you, but… if you lived to tell the tale, you would probably describe it more or less as I just did now, by relaying everything from the vantage point of your orientation at the time: jumping “to the right” of the boat, the shark “in front of you.” What you will probably not remember is whether the shark was exactly to the north of you swimming south or to the west swimming east. After all, when there is a shark right in front of you, one of the last things you worry about is the cardinal directions. Similarly, even if at the time you visited the museum you could have worked out the orientation of the room in which the picture was hanging, it is extremely unlikely that you will remember now if the window in the picture was to the north or the east of the girl. What you will see in your mind’s eye is the picture as it appeared when you stood in front of it, that’s all.

But if you speak a Guugu Yimithirr-style language, that sort of memory will simply not do. You cannot say “the window to the left of the girl” so you’ll have to remember if the window was north of her or east or south or west. In the same way, you cannot say “the shark in front of me.” If you want to describe the scene, you’d have to specify, even twenty years later, in which cardinal direction the shark was. So your memories of anything that you might ever want to report will have to be stored in your brain with cardinal directions as part of the picture.

Does this sound far-fetched? John Haviland filmed a Guugu Yimithirr speaker, Jack Bambi, telling his old friends the story of how in his youth he capsized in shark-infested waters but managed to swim safely ashore. Jack and another person were on a trip with a mission boat, delivering clothing and provisions to an outstation on the McIvor River. They were caught in a storm, and their boat capsized in a whirlpool. They both jumped into the water and managed to swim nearly three miles to the shore, only to discover, on returning to the mission, that Mr. Schwarz was far more concerned at the loss of the boat than relieved at their miraculous escape. Except for its content, the remarkable thing about the story is that it was remembered throughout in cardinal directions: Jack Bambi jumped into the water on the western side of the boat, his companion to the east of the boat, they saw a giant shark swimming north, and so on.

Perhaps the cardinal directions were just made up for the occasion? Well, quite by chance, Stephen Levinson filmed the same person two years later, telling the same story. The cardinal directions matched exactly in the two tellings. Even more remarkable were the hand gestures that accompanied Jack’s story. In the first film, shot in 1980, Jack is facing west. When he tells how the boat flipped over, he rolls his hands forward away from his body. In 1982, he is sitting facing north. Now, when he gets to the climactic point when the boat flips over, he makes a rolling movement from his right to his left. Only this way of representing the hand movements is all wrong. Jack was not rolling his hands from right to left at all. On both occasions, he was simply rolling his hands from east to