Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages (3 page)

But what happens when we try to peer further through the language glass, beyond the superficial level of the labels, at the concepts that lurk behind them? Are the concepts behind the English labels “rose” or “sweet” or “bird” or “cat” just as arbitrary as the labels themselves? Is the way our language carves up the world into concepts also merely a cultural convention? Or is it nature that has drawn for us the distinguishing boundary between “cat” and “dog” or “rose” and “bird”? If the question comes across as rather abstract, let’s put it to a practical test.

Imagine you are browsing in a forgotten corner of an old library and by chance you come across a musty eighteenth-century manuscript that seems never to have been opened since it was deposited there. It is entitled
Adventures on the Remote Island of Zift
, and it appears to relate in much detail a mysterious desert island that the author claims to have discovered. You leaf through it with trembling hands and start reading a chapter called “A Farther Account of the Ziftish Tongue Wherein Its Phantastick Phænomena Are Largely Describ’d”:

While we were at Dinner, I made bold to ask the Names of several things in their Language; and those noble Persons delighted to give me
Answers. Although my principal Endeavour was to learn, yet the Difficulty was almost insuperable, the whole Compass of their Thoughts and Mind being shut up to such Distinctions as to us appear most natural. They have, for example, no Word in their Tongue by which our Idea of B i r d can be expressed, nor are there any Terms, wherein that Language can express the Notion of a R o s e. For in their stead, Ziftish employs one Word, B o s e, which signifies white Roses and all Birds save those with crimson Chests, and yet another Word, R i r d, which betokens Birds with crimson Chests and all Roses save white ones.

Waxing ever more loquacious after his third Glass of Liquor, my Host began to orate a Fable he recollected from his Childhood: how the Bose and the Rird met their woful End: “A bright plumed Rird and a mellifluous yellow Bose alighted on a high branch and fell a-twittering. They presently began to debate which of the twain sang the sweeter. Having failed in reaching a firm Conclusion, the Rird proposed that they should seek the Judgement of those Emblems of Beauty among the Flowers in the Garden below. Without more ado, they fluttered down to a fragrant Bose and a budding red Rird, and humbly begged their Opinion. The yellow Bose carolled with slender voice, and the Rird piped his quavering Air. Alas, neither the Bose nor the Rird could distinguish the Bose’s cascading Cadences from the tremulous Trills of the Rird. Great was the Indignation of the proud Warblers. The Rird, his Rage inflamed, fell upon the red Rird and plucked off her petals, and the yellow Bose, his Vanity sore wounded, attacked the Bose with equal vehemence. Forthwith both Arbitresses stood naked and stripp’d of their petals, the Bose no longer fragrant and the Rird no longer red.”

Apprehending my Confusion, my Host intoned the Moral with much wagging of his Finger: “And thus remember: never fail to distinguish a Rird from a Bose!” I offered him my sincere Assurance that I would endeavour never to do so.

What do you take this precious document to be? An undiscovered diary of an early explorer or a lost sequel to
Gulliver’s Travels
? If you opted for fiction, it is probably because your common sense tells you
that the purported Ziftish manner of distinguishing concepts is fundamentally implausible, and that it is patently unnatural to combine red-chested birds and non-white roses into one concept, “rird,” and to lump other birds together with white roses into the concept “bose.” And if the Ziftish distinction between rird and bose is unnatural, the English division between bird and rose must in some way be natural. Healthy common sense suggests, therefore, that while languages can bestow labels entirely at whim, they cannot apply quite the same whimsy to the concepts behind the labels. Languages cannot group together arbitrary sets of objects, since it is birds of a feather that flock together under one label. Any language has to categorize the world in a way that brings together things that are similar in reality—or at least in our perception of reality. So it is natural for different types of birds to be named as one concept, but it is unnatural for a random set of birds and a random set of roses to be gathered together under one label.

In fact, even a cursory observation of the way children acquire language will confirm that concepts such as “bird” or “cat” or “dog” have something natural about them. Children ask almost all imaginable (and many unimaginable) questions. But have you ever heard a child saying, “Mommy, is this a cat or dog?” Rack your brains and rummage through your memories as hard as you can, you are unlikely to recall a child asking, “How can I tell if this is a bird or a rose?” While children always need to be taught the labels for such concepts in the particular language of their society, they don’t need to be told how to distinguish between the concepts themselves. It is quite enough for a toddler to see a few pictures of a cat in a picture book, and the next time she sees a cat, even if it’s ginger rather than tabby, even if it has longer hair, a shorter tail, only one eye, and a hind leg missing, she will still recognize it as a cat rather than a dog or bird or rose. Children’s instinctive grasp of such concepts shows that human brains are innately equipped with powerful pattern-recognition algorithms, which sort similar objects into groups. So concepts such as “cat” or “bird” must somehow correspond to this inborn aptitude to categorize the world.

So far, then, we seem to have arrived at a simple answer to the question of whether language reflects culture or nature. We have drawn a neat map and divided language into two distinct territories: the domain of labels and the land of concepts. The labels reflect cultural conventions, but the concepts reflect nature. Each culture is free to bestow labels onto concepts as it pleases, but the concepts behind these labels have been formed by the dictates of nature. A great deal can be said for this partition. It is clear, simple, and elegant, it is intellectually and emotionally satisfying, and, last but not least, it has a respectable pedigree that extends all the way back to Aristotle, who wrote in the fourth century
BC
that, although the sounds of speech may differ across the races, the concepts themselves—or, as he called them, the “impressions of the soul”—are the same for the whole of mankind.

Are there any possible objections to this map? Just one: it bears scant resemblance to reality. The neat border we have just marked may be a pretty work of wishful cartography, but unfortunately it does not represent the actual power relations on the ground with any accuracy. For in practice, culture not only controls the labels, but embarks on incessant raids across the border into what ought to be the birthright of nature. While the distinction between some concepts, such as “cat” and “dog,” may be delineated so clearly by nature that it is largely immune to culture’s onslaught, cultural conventions do manage to meddle in the internal affairs of many other concepts, in ways that sometimes upset plain common sense. Just how deeply culture penetrates the land of concepts, and how difficult it can be to come to terms with this state of affairs, is something that will become clearer in the following chapters. But for the moment, we can start with a quick reconnaissance tour of a few of culture’s strongholds across the border.

Consider first the realm of abstraction. What happens when we move away from simple physical objects like cats or birds or roses to abstract concepts such as “victory,” “fairness,” or “Schadenfreude”? Have such concepts also been decreed by nature? I once knew someone
who enjoyed saying that the French and the Germans have no mind. What he meant was that neither of their languages had a word for the English “mind,” and he was right in one sense: neither French nor German has a single concept, with a single label, that covers exactly the range of meanings of the English concept “mind.” If you ask a bilingual dictionary how to translate “mind” into French, the dictionary will explain patiently that it depends on the context. You will be given a list of possibilities, such as:

esprit
(peace of mind =
tranquillité d’esprit
)
tête
(it’s all in the mind =
c’est tout dans la tête
)
avis
(to my mind =
à mon avis
)
raison
(his mind is going =
il n’a plus toute sa raison
)
intelligence
(with the mind of a two-year-old =
avec l’intelligence d’un enfant de deux ans
)

Conversely, English does not have a single concept that covers exactly the range of meanings of the French
esprit
, as Bertrand Russell so spiritedly observed. Again, a dictionary would give a long list of different English words as possible translations, for instance:

wit (
avoir de l’esprit
= to have wit)
mood (
je n’ai pas l’esprit à rire
= I’m in no mood for laughing)
mind (
avoir l’esprit vif
= to have a quick mind)
spirit (
esprit d’équipe
= team spirit)

So concepts like “mind” or “
esprit
” cannot be natural in the way that “rose” or “bird” are; otherwise they would have been identical in all languages. As early as the seventeenth century, John Locke recognized that in the realm of abstract notions each language is allowed to carve up its own concepts—or “specific ideas,” as he called them—in its own way. In his 1690
Essay concerning Human Understanding
, he proved the point through the “great store of words in one language which have not any that answer them in another. Which plainly shows that those of one country, by their customs and manner of life, have found occasion to
make several complex ideas, and given names to them, which others never collected into specific ideas.”

Nature’s first concession to culture has not come as too much of a wrench, for even if the neat borderline between culture and nature has to be redrawn somewhat, the notion that cultural conventions are involved in determining the shape of abstract concepts is not seriously at odds with our basic intuition. After all, if instead of the story about the Ziftish concepts “bose” and “rird,” the eighteenth-century travelogue reported that Ziftish didn’t have a single word that corresponds to the English concept “fair” and that in lieu of it Ziftish uses the concept “just” in some contexts and “kind” in other contexts, our common sense would hardly be mobilized to march in protest.

But things quickly become less cozy when it transpires that culture interferes not just in the realm of abstraction but also in the simplest concepts of everyday discourse. Take pronouns such as “I,” “you,” or “we.” Could anything be more elementary or more natural than these? Of course, no one who is aware of the existence of foreign languages would be under the illusion that the labels for such concepts are dictated by nature, but it seems unimaginable that any language would not have the actual concepts themselves. Suppose, for instance, you continue thumbing through the travelogue and come across the claim that Ziftish doesn’t have a word that corresponds to English “we.” Instead, the author alleges, Ziftish has three distinct pronouns:
kita
, which means “just the two of us, me and you,”
tayo
, which means “me and you and someone else,” and
kami
, which means “me and someone else, but not you.” The author relates how tickled the Ziftians were to hear that for these three entirely different concepts English uses just one little word, a wee “we.” You may dismiss the system our chimerical author has invented as a lame joke, but Tagalog speakers in the Philippines would disagree, because this is exactly how they speak.

The strain on plain common sense is only just beginning, though. One might naturally expect that at least the concepts that describe simple physical objects would all be the prerogative of nature. As long as we restrict ourselves to cats, dogs, and birds, this expectation is in fact largely borne out, because these animals are so distinctly shaped by
nature. But the moment nature shows the slightest doubt in its incision, culture is quick to pounce. Consider the parts of the human body, for instance. Among the simple physical things that matter most to our lives, it hardly gets any simpler or more physical than hands and toes and fingers and necks. And yet many of these allegedly distinct body parts were not delineated by nature with much zeal. The arm and the hand, for example, are the body’s equivalent to the continents Asia and Europe—are they really one thing or two? It turns out that the answer depends on the culture you grew up in. There are many languages, my mother tongue included, that treat the hand and the arm as one concept and use the same label for both. If a Hebrew speaker tells you that when she was a child she got an injection in her hand, this is not because her doctors were sadistic, but simply because she is thinking in a language that doesn’t make the distinction as a matter of course, so she has forgotten to use a different word for that particular part of the hand that English curiously insists on calling an “arm.” On the other arm, there was a fairly long period when my daughter, who had learned that
yad
in Hebrew meant “hand,” objected loudly whenever I used
yad
to refer to the arm, even when we spoke in Hebrew. She would point at the arm and explain to me in indignant tones:
ze lo yad
(it’s not
yad
),
ze arm
(it’s “arm”)! The fact that “hand” and “arm” are different things in one language but the same thing in another is not so easy to grasp.