I’ve long been fascinated by language, and I think one of the real benefits of the English language is its ability to (fairly seamlessly) absorb new concepts and make them its own. No real word invented for the concept of searching on the Internet? Suddenly, we’re all Googling — and we know what it means, despite is having just been coined.
But it goes much further than that. I was enthralled by this essay, which I read recently, exploring how your language can shape your thoughts in ways I never thought possible. Imagine a language that doesn’t have a concept of “right” or “left” for example — everything is absolute, and nothing is relative — so that you end up saying things like “you have an ant on your southwest leg.”
It turns out that people who use language like that are, understandably, better at staying oriented, even when they’re in unfamiliar places. But they also do some other things differently:
We gave people sets of pictures that showed some kind of temporal progression (e.g., pictures of a man aging, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. If you ask English speakers to do this, they’ll arrange the cards so that time proceeds from left to right. Hebrew speakers will tend to lay out the cards from right to left, showing that writing direction in a language plays a role. …
The Kuuk Thaayorre did not arrange the cards more often from left to right than from right to left, nor more toward or away from the body. But their arrangements were not random: there was a pattern, just a different one from that of English speakers. Instead of arranging time from left to right, they arranged it from east to west. That is, when they were seated facing south, the cards went left to right. When they faced north, the cards went from right to left. When they faced east, the cards came toward the body and so on. This was true even though we never told any of our subjects which direction they faced.
But it’s more than that. Even subtler difference can change how you think:
When asked to describe a “key” — a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish — the German speakers were more likely to use words like “hard,” “heavy,” “jagged,” “metal,” “serrated,” and “useful,” whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say “golden,” “intricate,” “little,” “lovely,” “shiny,” and “tiny.” To describe a “bridge,” which is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish, the German speakers said “beautiful,” “elegant,” “fragile,” “peaceful,” “pretty,” and “slender,” and the Spanish speakers said “big,” “dangerous,” “long,” “strong,” “sturdy,” and “towering.” This was true even though all testing was done in English, a language without grammatical gender.
It really makes you wonder what other unspoken assumptions there are lurking on our psyches, just waiting to be explored.
I’m guessing Mandarin speakers – with its 4 tones adding as much meaning as the actual word – have a musical bent.
I read somewhere that Japanese test subjects tend to look at an image in an overall sense, the ‘big picture’ so to speak. Whereas English or western subjects tend to fixate individual elements. Maybe that’s a societal product but language is ultimately an expression of a society.
In an even broader sense, I think this speaks to the adaptability of our human brains. If we can “train” them to perceive the world in different ways from birth, I wonder if we should be looking at early childhood education with this in mind.
Funny you mention that. Children have a built-in ability to soak up languages WAY faster than we geezers…it gradually fades away by the time we hit our teens and know everything.
I’ve seen this with friends who have bi-national/racial marriages — kids often speak English and whatever quite interchangeably and with no difficulty.
The really interesting research might come from studying kids who know two different languages with entirely different origins — English and Japanese, say or Spanish and Urdu. I’d suspect languages with similar roots like English and French or English and Spanish are too alike.
Pinker’s book “The Stuff of Thought” has some interesting ideas about what language tells us about culture. Neat book, even though Pinker’s writing grates on my brain a little and I think he missed out on a possible Nietzsche reference, who claimed that our understanding of truths is interpreted by language and filtered by the metaphors, anthropomorphisms, etc. that we use to perceive and communicate.