Through the Language Glass

"Yes – ish. Deustcher does a great job of first taking on those old notions. He goes back to the romantic 20th century ideas, in particular to a writer called Benjamin Lee Whorf. Whorf was an amateur linguist, he was largely self-taught but spent a lot of time doing research on this topic. Whorf famously claimed that the Hopi Indians of the American Southwest did not have a concept of time like westerners, because their language lacked those words. It turns out that he was wrong on both counts. His claims were based on interviews with one Hopi Indian in New York. Whorf was just off base and later researchers showed that. But the horse was out of the barn. This notion that people think profoundly differently according to their language went racing around the world. Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said: ‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.’ Deutscher cleverly and really comprehensively describes the takedown of Whorfianism that happened with Chomsky, and the generation of linguists that Chomsky built around him/that followed him. Chomsky argued that all languages are fundamentally similar. He calls their underlying structure the ‘universal grammar’; and has set out trying to find all of those things that bind the world’s languages together since then. But now, the pendulum is swinging back the other way. Some brave people have defied Chomsky, which is very difficult, because he doesn’t suffer fools gladly. They’ve pushed back on him and argue that different languages sometimes do have different views of the world. One is the gendered noun. If you study most European languages, you learn, for example, that the French table is feminine, it’s la table , not le table . And it turns out that people have different attitudes towards even totally inanimate nouns, depending on their gender. A table isn’t inherently feminine, but it’s feminine in French, so French people will be more likely, if asked to describe a table, to use feminine-like adjectives. Or a key. Germans describe a key as rigid and hard and strong. That’s because it’s masculine in German. Spaniards will describe a key as feminine, as gold and tiny and beautiful, because it’s feminine in Spanish. These findings are fairly small-scale. They’re interesting and they make for good cocktail party conversation, but you wouldn’t argue: ‘Oh my God, this leads to a completely different cognition on the part of German versus Spanish speakers!’ After all, key doesn’t have any inherent sex, so if you ask people to pre-associate words with it, they’re going to grab whatever they’ve got – and it’s probably not surprising they grab for the grammatical gender in their language. But one really striking example is to do with the Kuuk Thaayorre who live in northern Australia. It’s a tribe that does not have words for relative directions. They don’t say ‘left’ or ‘right’ or ‘up’ or ‘down’ or ‘back’. They use only the cardinal directions i.e. north, south, east and west. So instead of saying: ‘Hand me that cup of water by your left hand,’ they’ll say: ‘Hand me that cup of water by your southwest hand.’ Or: ‘You have an ant on your northeast leg.’ So how are they able to do this? The answer is that they have to remain constantly orientated. And it turns out that if you spin them around, put them in a cave, or try all sorts of things to discombobulate them, they can still unfailingly point in the right direction. So here is one example where you really do see that the fact their language has this property requires their cognition to build around that in a different way. And a group that lives right next door to them, in the same environment, does not have that ability to orientate themselves."