Does our Native Language Change Our Understanding of the World?
Another post about Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue
My last article claimed to discuss John McWhorter’s Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, but I lied. That review only discussed two of the book’s five chapters. I think that’s the sign of a quality book. I’ve read plenty of longer non-fiction books and thought they provided little more than a Wikipedia article. Meanwhile, McWhorter packs a lot into this merely 200-ish-page book. I considered one chapter deserving of its own article, and that’s the one about the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (SWH). The hypothesis claims that our native language changes the way we perceive and understand the external world. I should note, as McWhorter does, that Sapir and Whorf never wrote anything together, and their own thoughts were more complex. Regardless, everyone calls it SWH now, so I will follow that nomenclature
You’ve probably seen SWH-esque claims before: this tribe in the Amazon does X or thinks X because of their language’s features. These claims align with a certain “everything is a cultural construct” thinking that’s popular in certain circles. Whorf, the W in the SWH, claimed the Hopi people understood time differently because their language lacked a future tense. Though Whorf hedged his claim, McWhorter finds no shortage of intellectuals who express similar beliefs.
The Canadian Experience of Eggs
To start, I think it’s worth thinking about the pitfalls one might face when analyzing another culture. As with most areas of life, the best writing on this topic comes from The Onion. Let me introduce you to Perky ‘Canada’ Has Own Laws, Government. I recommend reading the entire piece, but here are some highlights:
[Canada] even has its own currency, says Dorman, various denominations of “dollars” that can be exchanged for the many products manufactured in Canada, including Canadian bacon and ice.
[…]
In fact, Canadians enjoy advancements such as refrigerated food, zippers and printing,” notes Dor-man, an “accountant” who goes to work wearing the comfortable trou-sers, dress shirt and necktie that form a traditional Canadian costume. “Our industries are large and varied, ranging from logging to automobile manufacturing.”
Not too shabby for a nation that just 240 years ago had no electricity.
[…]
Canada has produced many prominent people who have gone on to great success in hockey… “It’s in our blood, it’s part of our heritage, and it brings people together,” [a hockey player] says of the sport Canada picked up from America in the late ’50s.
Now I’ll ruin the fun a bit by explaining the joke. I see a tendency to write about foreign cultures in a condescending manner. Commentators can treat people from other cultures as magical, innocent weirdos and act shocked when a culture happens to share some similarities with us. One sees this in the “Nobel Savage” or “Magical Indian” trop. The Onion turns this on its head by applying it to Canadians. The reader knows that Canadians aren’t very different from their southern neighbors, so applying the condescending “Nobel Savage” trope creates a funny incongruence.
The Worst Genre of Writing
If I bought Twitter, I would immediately ban the following type of writing. Someone finds a word from another language, claims it can’t be translated into English, and then translate it into English. Luckily, McWhorter also hates this genre, and he provides a clever example of why it fails. Consider the word egthu from India’s Boro language. It means:
when people getting to know one another start to establish a sense of comfort and connection
We don’t have a word for that in English! The Boro do, so does this provide us some insight into the Boro culture?
Well, get ready for the plot twist: that’s not the meaning of egthu in Boro. That’s one meaning of the English word “bond.” Yes, it’s not the most common usage of the word, but the definition fits a use case. McWhorter argues that the same occurs when people find these oddly specific words in other languages. Oftentimes, when researchers ask what a word means, the native speaker provides an interesting example instead of the banal base case. If I asked a bunch of English speakers what “bond” means, according to McWhorter, most people would understand it means something like “put stuff together.” Yet, a few speakers might provide an answer like the one above.
As for the real Boro words, McWhorter finds no reason to view them as causing cultural differences. Here are a couple examples:
khonsay - to pick up a sacred object with care as it is rare or scare
asusu - to feel unknown or uneasy in a new place
Yes, English lacks an equivalent verb to asusu. Yet, as the book notes, one might say “I’m not acclimated” to express the same idea. English speakers, then, employ an adjective rather than a verb for the concept. It’s hard to see why that would change the way we view the world. As for the first word, neither McWhorter nor I can think of an English equivalent. I would imagine that we English speakers still pick up sacred objects with care. I’ve never read the phrase “handle with care,” and thought “huh? What the heck does that mean?”
I’ll go one step further than McWhorter. I think one can provide a melodramatic definition of almost any word. To illustrate this, let me define the German word Katze and the Dutch word kat.
German Katze - A domesticated, carnivorous mammalian hunter, related to tigers and lions, known for its companionship, ability to detect and attack moving objects, balance, unique vocalizations, and impressive sense of smell and hearing.
Dutch kat - cat
Gosh, aren’t Germans so in touch with nature?
Thus, it seems that we can’t study cultural differences via oddly specific terms. Instead, let’s look at grammar. Specifically, our grammar. If language impacts thought, what does that say about us?
Engelse Grammatica
McWhorter lists a few ways our grammar differs from both Old English and other Germanic tongues like Dutch and German. Readers of this blog will be familiar with most of them.
English relies on an auxiliary “do” for questions and negations. See “Do you eat fish?” and “I do not eat fish.”
English lacks grammatical gender
English lacks a case system, except in pronouns (he vs him)
English contains few reflexive verbs. We say “we hurry” instead of “we hurry ourselves” and “I fear” instead of “I fear myself.” Note that the “myself,” in this case, doesn’t refer to the speaker being afraid of himself. The “myself” was necessary to indicate that fear occurred internally.
English users “here” for both moving and stationary objects
What do these facts tell us about modern English speakers? Are we more aware of negations and questions than our Old English-speaking counterparts? Well, the Dutch, negate nouns with geen and everything else with niet. Do they recognize a distinction that we don’t? Also, consider case and gender. Were Old English speakers more attenuated to gender than us? If so, what should we make of the Dutch, where the masculine and feminine grammatical genders are combined? Did Old English understand the difference between subject and object better than us? If so, does that added understanding return we use pronouns like “they” and “them?” We can also consider reflexive verbs. When English speakers lost the “myself” in “I fear myself,” did we fail to realize that our fear occurs internally? What about our usage of “here?” Do we fail to distinguish moving and still objections?
Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue stops there, but I can add some examples from other Germanic languages.
Dutch uses lenen to mean both “lend” and “borrow.” Are they less aware of the distinction between borrowing and lending? Or are they more attenuated to the connection between them?
Similarly, they say lernen for both “teach” and “learn.” One can ask the same questions about that verb.
Dutch uses ze for both “she” and “they.” Do they see some connection between one woman and multiple individuals? If so, their eastern neighbors must connect a lot more. In German, sie stands in for “she,” “they,” and (when capitalized) formal “you.”
In English present perfect, “have” applies to all verbs. We say “I have eaten” and “I have driven.” In Dutch, they use “be” (zijn) for verbs that imply a change of location or state and (hebben) for verbs that don’t. Yet, blijven, meaning “stay,” requires a zijn. I don’t even know what that would say about Dutch thought.
One can imagine some alternative history where Dutch and German were relegated to some small tribe. In this universe, the New Teotihuacan Times may write about the Dutch’s mystical view of gender or their down-to-earth acknowledgment of the symmetry between learning and teaching. A pot smoker would discuss blijven. They would say that the Dutch understand that, if you really think about it, staying is really moving. Makes so much sense, bro.
Let’s return to the original SPW example: the Hopi. Some SPW advocates insisted that their lack of a future tense causes them to understand time in a circular, rather than linear, way. If so, the same must be said about speakers of Japanese and Russian, which also lack a future tense. Other languages express future actions with the present tense, including, you know, this one. Consider the sentence “I’m visiting my parents next weekend.” Here, I’m expressing a future action using the present tense! One can read similar sentences in Dutch. Yet, no one writes about the Germanic circularity of time.
In short, one cannot find any sensible causality between one’s experience of the world and either grammar or vocabulary. Languages might say things differently, but they can all say the same things.
What’s Really Going On Here
McWhorter accepts some grains of truth to weak SWH. One study showed that, when asked to picture a cartoon key, German speakers visualized a male while French ones saw a female. This aligned with each language’s grammatical genders since “key” is masculine in Allemande and feminine in Französisch. I’ve also seen some evidence of color differentiation ability varying between languages. Still, none of this represents major differences in the way people see the world. We don’t spend a lot of time picturing cartoon keys or choosing between similar shades of blue.
Given this meager evidence, McWhorter believes that the SWH serves political goals rather than intellectual ones. In fact, Sapir was transparent about his motives. He wrote during a time when people talked about “civilizing the savages,” so his writing acted as a helpful counterweight.
Today, however, this material often reads like The Onion’s “Perky Canada” article. Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue cites one example concerning Algonquian, a Native American language family. A linguist found that, in this language family, the “I” always follows the other pronouns. The linguists concluded that this caused some level of selflessness among these speakers. This turned out to be a misunderstanding, and, in fact, “I” sometimes precede the pronouns in Algonquian languages. Another researcher argued that Chinese speakers struggled with hypotheticals, as Mandarin lacks a verb conjugation for hypotheticals. In other words, the study found that Westerners were the more enlightened ones. The SWH champions attacked this study, even though it looks exactly like the ones that showed non-Westerners were the cool kids. To McWhorter, this proved the political nature of the project.
So, what’s my angle on this? As someone who likes reading and writing about language, maybe its impotence should disappoint me. Yet, I’m not disappointed. I think it’s okay to like something that doesn’t change the material world. The fact that Dutch distinguishes zijn and hebben verbs probably tells us nothing about the Dutch. The fact that we don’t distinguish them probably tells us nothing about us. I don’t think that makes the study of language any less meaningful. We can like things for their own sake.
Here's Bryan W. Van Norden (Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy, p. 245) on one interesting possible example of the SWF (construed weakly as one's language influencing--not determining--one's thinking):
"There has been some interesting speculation about whether (as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis predicts) the structural differences between the Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan languages influenced the different development of philosophy in Europe and China.
One major difference is that all the Indo-European languages have forms of the verb “to be” (for example, einai in Greek or esse in Latin). This verb expresses existence (“there are mice in the basement”), predication (“the mice are happy”), identity (“Clark Kent is Superman”), membership in a group (“Clark Kent is a reporter”), and truth (“Is not!” “Is so!”). There is no one verb or grammatical construction that performs all of these roles in Classical Chinese. There are separate Classical Chinese expressions for “existence” (有/無, “to have”/“to not have”) and “truth” (然/不然, “is so”/“is not so”), while predication is handled by full verbs (樂/不樂, “is happy”/“is not happy”) and both identity and group membership by a particular grammatical construction (X Y 也/X 非 Y 也, X is (a) Y/X is not (a) Y).
The fact that Greek and Latin had the verb “to be” while Classical Chinese did not may have led to some of the characteristic differences between Chinese and Western philosophy. Plato is one of the fathers of Western philosophy, and one of his main concerns was the nature of Being. But there is no way to say “Being” in Classical Chinese. Consequently, certain metaphysical issues became central to Western philosophy in a way that they almost couldn’t have in Chinese philosophy."
To extend the speculation (with remarks I hopefully correctly remember from a prof in undergrad), it's been argued that Aristotle sorted out the distinction between properties and things, which Plato ran together (cf. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691010205/the-discovery-of-things). But there'd be nothing to sort out if his language had distinct copulas for the two! This example aside, I'd suggest that language doesn't influence ordinary thinking, at least not in any radical way, but can influence the course of both philosophy and literature, to the extent that the former is generated by linguistic confusion and the latter structurally influenced by grammar and syntax.
I loved this magnificent takedown of the SWH, which I agree with you is ignorant and condescending at the same time. Whenever someone claims that you can’t have a feeling unless your language contains a word for it, I think of one of their favorite examples--Schadenfreude--and laugh to myself. Not only do we English speakers have the feeling of Schadenfreude, but we have a word for it: Schadenfreude, which we’ve taken into our own language.
Incidentally, just the other day I was talking to a Swedish friend, and she told me she had “borrowed her book to another friend and needed to get it back.” Then she stopped, corrected herself, and explained that Swedish has a single verb for “to borrow” and “to lend,” and when she speaks English she needs to remember in which direction the item is being given so she will choose the correct verb. In other words, she thinks about borrowing and lending in exactly the same way that English speakers do, in spite of both actions being covered by a single verb in Swedish.