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

reported above are no exception. But the evidence that has emerged so far leaves little doubt that the idiosyncrasies of a gender system exert a significant influence on speakers’ thoughts. When a language treats inanimate objects in the same way as it treats women and men, with the same grammatical forms or with the same “he” and “she” pronouns, the habits of grammar can spill over to habits of mind beyond grammar. The grammatical nexus between object and gender is imposed on children from the earliest age and reinforced many thousands of times throughout their lives. This constant drilling affects the associations that speakers develop about inanimate objects and can clothe their notions of such objects in womanly or manly traits. The evidence suggests that sex-related associations are not only fabricated on demand but present even when they are not actively solicited.

Gender thus provides our second example of how the mother tongue influences thought. As before, the relevant difference between languages with and without a gender system is not in what they allow their speakers to convey but in what they habitually force their speakers to say. There is no evidence to suggest that grammatical gender affects anyone’s ability to reason logically. Speakers of gendered languages are perfectly able to understand the difference between sex and syntax, and are not under the illusion that inanimate objects have biological sex. German women rarely mistake their husbands for a hat (even though hats are masculine), Spanish men are not known to confuse a bed with what might be lying in it, and animism does not seem to be more widespread in Italy or Russia than in Anglo-Saxonia. Conversely, there is no reason to suspect that speakers of Hungarian or Turkish or Indonesian, which do not make gender distinctions even on pronouns, are in any way constrained from understanding the finer points about the birds and the bees.

Nevertheless, even if grammatical gender does not restrict anyone’s capacity for reasoning, that does not make its consequence any less severe for those immured in a gendered mother tongue. For a gender system may come close to being a prison-house nevertheless-a prison-house of associations. The chains of associations imposed by the genders of one’s language are all but impossible to cast off.

But if you native speakers of English are tempted to feel sorry for those of us who are shackled by the heavy load of an irrational gender system, then think again. I would never want to change places with you. My mind may be weighed down by an arbitrary and illogical set of associations, but my world has so much to it that you entirely miss out on, because the landscape of my language is so much more fertile than your arid desert of “it’s.”

It goes without saying that genders are language’s gift to poets. Heine’s masculine pine tree longs for the feminine palm; Boris Pasternak’s My Sister Life can work only because “life” is feminine in Russian; English translations of Charles Baudelaire’s “L’homme et la mer,” however inspired, can never hope to capture the tempestuous relationship of attraction and antagonism that he evokes between “him” (the man) and “her” (the sea); nor can English do justice to Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to the Sea,” in which the (masculine) el mar strikes a stone (una piedra) and then “he caresses her, kisses her, drenches her, pounds his chest, repeating his own name”-the English “it caresses it, kisses it, drenches it, pounds its chest” is not quite the same.

Needless to say, genders cheer up the everyday life of ordinary mortals too. Genders may be a nightmare for foreign learners, but they do not seem to cause any serious trouble to native speakers, and they make the world a livelier place. How tedious it would be if bees weren’t “she’s” and butterflies “he’s,” if one didn’t step from feminine pavements to masculine roads, if twelve masculine months didn’t crowd inside one feminine year, if one couldn’t greet Mr. Cucumber and Lady Cauliflower in the proper way. I would never want to forfeit my genders. Along with Aunt Augusta, I would rather say to the English language that to lose one gender may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

9. Russian Blues

Visitors to Japan in possession of a sharp eye might notice something unusual about the color of some traffic lights. Not that there is anything odd about the basic scheme: just like everywhere else, the red light in Japan means “stop,” green is for “go,” and an orange light appears in between. But those who take a good look will see that the green lights are a different shade of green from that of other countries, and have a distinct bluish tint. The reason why is not an Oriental superstition about the protective powers of turquoise or a spillage of blue toner in a Japanese plastic factory, but a bizarre twist of linguistic-political history.

Japanese used to have a color word, ao, that spanned both green and blue. In the modern language, however, ao has come to be restricted mostly to blue shades, and green is usually expressed by the word midori (although even today ao can still refer to the green of freshness or unripeness-green apples, for instance, are called ao ringo). When the first traffic lights were imported from the United States and installed in Japan in the 1930s, they were just as green as anywhere else. Nevertheless, in common parlance the go light was dubbed ao shingoo, perhaps because the three primary colors on Japanese artists’ palettes are traditionally aka (red), kiiro (yellow), and ao. The label ao for a green light did not appear so out of the ordinary at first, because of the remaining associations of the word ao with greenness. But over time, the discrepancy between the green color and the dominant meaning of the word ao began to feel jarring. Nations with a weaker spine might have opted for the feeble solution of simply changing the official name of the go light to midori. Not so the Japanese. Rather than alter the name to fit reality, the Japanese government decreed in 1973 that reality should be altered to fit the name: henceforth, go lights would be a color that better corresponded to the dominant meaning of ao. Alas, it was impossible to change the color to real blue, because Japan is party to an international convention that ensures road signs have a measure of uniformity around the globe. The solution was thus to make the ao light as bluish as possible while still being officially green (see figure 7).

The turquoising of the traffic light in Japan is a rather out-of-the-way example of how the quirks of a language can change reality and thus affect what people get to see in the world. But of course this is not the kind of influence of language that we have been concerned with in the previous few chapters. Our question is whether speakers of different languages might perceive the same reality in different ways, just because of their mother tongues. Are the color concepts of our language a lens through which we experience colors in the world?

In returning to the subject of color, this final chapter tries to discharge an old debt, by turning on its head the nineteenth-century question about the relation between language and perception. Recall that Gladstone, Geiger, and Magnus believed that differences in the vocabulary of color resulted from preexisting differences in color perception. But could it be that cause and effect have been reversed here? Is it possible that linguistic differences can be the cause of differences in perception? Could the color distinctions we routinely make in our language affect our sensitivity to certain colors? Could our sensation of a Chagall painting or the stained-glass windows of Chartres cathedral depend on whether our language has a word for “blue”?

Few thrills of later life can match the excitement of teenage philosophizing into the small hours of the morning. One particularly profound insight that tends to emerge from these sessions of pimpled metaphysics is the shattering realization that one can never know how other people really see colors. You and I may both agree that one apple is “green” and another “red,” but for all I know, when you say “red” you may actually experience my green, and vice versa. We can never tell, even if we compare notes until kingdom come, because if my sensation was in red-green negative from yours, we would still agree on all color descriptions when we communicated verbally. We would agree on calling ripe tomatoes red and unripe ones green, and we would even agree that red is a warm color and green is a cooler color, for in my world flames look green-which I call “red”-so I would associate this color with warmness.

Of course, we are meant to be dealing with serious science here, not with juvenile lucubrations. The only problem is that as far as understanding the actual sensation of color is concerned, modern science does not seem