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

by Guy Deutscher

The dominant view among contemporary linguists is that language is primarily an instinct, in other words, that the fundaments of language are coded in our genes and are the same across the human race. Noam Chomsky has famously argued that a Martian scientist would conclude that all earthlings speak dialects of the same language.

In this plaidoyer for culture, I will argue that cultural differences are reflected in language in profound ways, and that a growing body of reliable scientific research provides solid evidence that our mother tongue can affect how we think and how we perceive the world.

In fact, the areas of culture we shall be concerned with belong to the most down-to-earth level of everyday life, and the aspects of language we shall encounter are on the most down-to-earth level of everyday speech. For it turns out that the most significant connections between language, culture, and thought are to be found where they are least expected, in those places where healthy common sense would suggest that all cultures and all languages should be exactly the same.

The scientific concept of “culture” emerged in Germany in the midnineteenth century but was first articulated explicitly by the English anthropologist Edward Tylor in 1871. Tylor started his seminal book, Primitive Culture, with the following definition, which is still quoted today in almost any introduction to the subject: “Taken in its wide ethnographic sense, [culture] is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” Culture is understood here as all human traits that are not the result of instinct—in other words, as a synonym for nurture as opposed to nature. Culture thus encompasses all aspects of our behavior that have evolved as social conventions and are transmitted through learning from generation to generation.

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”?

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.

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.

In Hebrew, the neck (tsavar) refers only to the front part of this tube, whereas the back part, oref, has an entirely unrelated name and is considered just as distinct as the English “back” is from “belly” or “hand” is from “arm.”

Gladstone’s scrutiny of the Iliad and the Odyssey revealed that there is something awry about Homer’s descriptions of color, and the conclusions Gladstone draws from his discovery are so radical and so bewildering that his contemporaries are entirely unable to digest them and largely dismiss them out of hand. But before long, Gladstone’s conundrum will launch a thousand ships of learning, have a profound effect on the development of at least three academic disciplines, and trigger a war over the control of language between nature and culture that after 150 years shows no sign of abating.

Needless to say, all this was twelve years before Heinrich Schliemann actually found Troy on a mound overlooking the Dardanelles; before he excavated the palace of Mycenae, homeland of the Greek overlord Agamemnon; before it became clear that both Troy and Mycenae were rich and powerful cities at the same period in the late second millennium BC; before later excavations showed that Troy was destroyed in a great conflagration soon after 1200 BC; before sling stones and other weapons were found on the site, proving that the destruction was caused by an enemy siege; before a clay document was unearthed that turned out to be a treaty between a Hittite king and the land of Wilusa; before the same Wilusa was securely identified as none other than Homer’s Ilios; before a ruler of Wilusa whom the treaty calls Alaksandu could thus be related to Homer’s Alexandros, prince of Troy; before—in short—Gladstone’s feeling that the Iliad was more than just a quilt of groundless myths turned out to have been rather less foolish than his contemporaries imagined.

It is therefore all the more startling that Gladstone’s tour de force comes to such a strange conclusion. To phrase it somewhat anachronistically, he argued that Homer and his contemporaries perceived the world in something closer to black and white than to full Technicolor.

Probably the single most famous phrase from the whole Iliad and Odyssey that is still in common currency today is that immortal color epithet, the “wine-dark sea.” But let’s consider this description with persnickety Gladstonian literal-mindedness for a moment. As it happens, “wine-dark” is already an act of redemptive interpretation in the translation, for what Homer actually says is oinops, which literally means “wine-looking” (oinos is “wine” and op- is the root “see”). But what does the color of the sea have to do with wine?

Here, for instance, is how Geiger described the ancient Indian Vedic poems, in particular their treatment of the sky: “These hymns, of more than ten thousand lines, are brimming with descriptions of the heavens. Scarcely any subject is evoked more frequently. The sun and reddening dawn’s play of color, day and night, cloud and lightning, the air and the ether, all these are unfolded before us over and over again, in splendor and vivid fullness. But there is only one thing that no one would ever learn from those ancient songs who did not already know it, and that is that the sky is blue.”

On the basis of a few ancient texts and supported only by inspired inferences from some faint etymological traces, he thus reconstructs a complete chronological sequence for the emergence of sensitivity to different prismatic colors. Mankind’s perception of color, he says, increased “according to the schema of the color spectrum”: first came the sensitivity to red, then to yellow, then to green, and only finally to blue and violet. The most remarkable thing about it all, he adds, is that this development seems to have occurred in exactly the same order in different cultures all over the world.

On the night of November 14, 1875, two Swedish express trains collided on the single-track main line between Malmö and Stockholm.

But it was a biblical scholar, Franz Delitzsch, who put it most memorably when he wrote in 1878 that “we see in essence not with two eyes but with three: with the two eyes of the body and with the eye of the mind that is behind them. And it is in this eye of the mind in which the cultural-historical progressive development of the color sense takes place.”

The culturalists tried to make the idea more appealing by pointing out that even in modern languages we use idioms that are rather imprecise about color. Don’t we speak of “white wine,” for instance, even if we can see perfectly well that it is really yellowish green? Don’t we have “black cherries” that are dark red and “white cherries” that are yellowish red? Aren’t red squirrels really brown? Don’t the Italians call the yolk of an egg “red” (il rosso)? Don’t we call the color of orange juice “orange,” although it is in fact perfectly yellow? (Check it next time.) And another example that would not occur to people in the nineteenth century: would race relations between the “dark browns” and “pinkish browns” have been as tortured as between “blacks” and “whites”?

The missionary who lived among the Ovaherero in Namibia, for instance, wrote that they could see the difference between green and blue but simply thought it was ridiculous that there should be different names for these two shades of the same color. What had seemed almost impossible to contemplate a few years before turned out to be a plain fact: people can spot the difference between different colors but can still fail to give them separate names.

To most people who have heard of him, W. H. R. Rivers is the compassionate psychiatrist who treated Siegfried Sassoon during World War I.

But Rivers’s vocation as the salve of shell-shocked souls came only later in life, after a distinguished career in two other fields: experimental psychology and then anthropology.

It turns out that the natives of Britain show the most curious confusions in their color terminology in the siniy and goluboy area of spectrum. In fact, the aboriginal population of those cloud-swept isles does not distinguish between siniy and goluboy at all and calls them by the same name!

Rivers did not have children of his own, but it is tempting to think that if he had examined Western children’s struggles with color, he might not have been so flummoxed by the Torres Strait islanders. Scientists have long been aware that children’s acquisition of color vocabulary is remarkably slow and laborious.

The equal complexity slogan is just a myth, an urban legend that linguists repeat because they have heard other linguists repeat it before them, having in turn heard others repeat it earlier.

In German, on the other hand, there are at least seven different ways of forming plurals:

There is a joke from the days of plenty in the former Soviet Union about a woman who goes to the butcher’s and asks, “Could you measure me out two hundred grams of salami, please?” “No problem, madam,” replies the butcher. “Just bring me the salami.”

The recent surveys strongly support Perkins’s conclusions and show that languages of large societies are more likely to have simpler word structure, whereas languages of smaller societies are more likely to have many semantic distinctions coded within the word.

The forces of destruction draw their energy from a rather unenergetic human trait: laziness. The tendency to save effort leads speakers to take shortcuts in pronunciation, and with time the accumulated effects of such shortcuts can weaken and even flatten whole arrays of endings and thus make the structure of words much simpler. Ironically, the very same laziness is also behind the creation of new complex word structures. Through the grind of repetition, two words that often appear together can be worn down and, in the process, fuse into a single word—just think of “I’m,” “he’s,” “o’clock,” “don’t,” “gonna.” In this way, more complex words can arise.

Another factor that may explain the differences in morphological complexity between small and large societies is the degree of exposure to different languages or even to different varieties of the same language.

Pressures for simplification can also arise from contact between different varieties of the same language, since even minor differences in the makeup of words can cause problems for comprehension.

Finally, one factor that may slow down the creation of new morphology is that ultimate hallmark of a complex society—literacy. In fluent speech, there are no real spaces between words, so when two words frequently appear together they can easily fuse into one. In the written language, however, the word takes on a visible independent existence, reinforcing speakers’ perception of the border between words. This doesn’t mean that new fusions ain’t never gonna happen in literate societies. But the rate at which new fusions occur may be substantially reduced. In short, writing may be a counterforce that retards the emergence of more complex word structures.

Rotokas from Papua New Guinea has only six distinct consonants (p, t, k, b, d, g), Hawaiian has eight, but the !Xóõ language from Botswana has forty-seven non-click consonants and seventy-eight different clicks that appear at the beginning of words. The number of vowels also varies considerably: many Australian languages have just three (u, a, i), Rotokas and Hawaiian have five each (a, e, i, o, u), whereas English has around twelve or thirteen vowels (depending on variety) and eight diphthongs.

aorists

In fact, in his voluminous musings on this subject, Humboldt abided by the first two commandments for any great thinker: (1) Thou shalt be vague, (2) Thou shalt not eschew self-contradiction.

The verbs “realize” and “know,” for example, are called “factive,” because if you say something like “Alice realized that her friends had left,” you are implying that what Alice realized was a true fact. (So it would be very odd to say “Alice realized that her friends had left, but in fact they hadn’t.”) On the other hand, non-factive verbs such as “assume” do not imply a true fact:

“Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” The crucial differences between languages, in other words, are not in what each language allows its speakers to express—for in theory any language could express anything—but in what information each language obliges it speakers to express.

If different languages influence their speakers’ minds in varying ways, this is not because of what each language allows people to think but rather because of the kinds of information each language habitually obliges people to think about. When a language forces its speakers to pay attention to certain aspects of the world each time they open their mouths or prick up their ears, such habits of speech can eventually settle into habits of mind with consequences for memory, or perception, or associations, or even practical skills.

In addition, the verb has a system of distinctions that linguists call “evidentiality,” and as it happens, the Matses system of evidentiality is the most elaborate that has ever been reported for any language. Whenever Matses speakers use a verb, they are obliged to specify—like the finickiest of lawyers—exactly how they came to know about the facts they are reporting. The Matses, in other words, have to be master epistemologists. There are separate verbal forms depending on whether you are reporting direct experience (you saw someone passing by with your own eyes), something inferred from evidence (you saw footprints on the sand), conjecture (people always pass by at that time of day), or hearsay (your neighbor told you he had seen someone passing by). If a statement is reported with the incorrect evidentiality form, it is considered a lie.

The only real difference between English and Matses, therefore, is that Matses forces its speakers to supply all this information whenever they describe an event, whereas English does not. Whether the requirement to specify evidentiality translates into habits of mind that affect more than language is something that no one has yet studied empirically.

But most damaging to the credibility of “kangaroo” was the report of another explorer, Captain Philip Parker King, who visited the mouth of the very same Endeavour River in 1820, fifty years after Cook had left. When Captain King asked the Aborigines he met there what the animal was called, he was given a completely different name from what Cook had recorded. King transcribed the name in his own diary as “minnar” or “meenuah.”

Haviland discovered that Guugu Yimithirr, as spoken by the older generation, does not have words for “left” or “right” as directions at all. Even more strangely, it does not even use terms such as “in front of” or “behind” to describe the position of objects. Whenever we would use the egocentric system, the Guugu Yimithirr use the four cardinal directions: gungga (North), jiba (South), guwa (West), and naga (East).

Instead of searching in vain for how the lack of egocentric coordinates might constrain the Guugu Yimithirr’s intellectual horizons, we should turn to the Boas-Jakobson principle and look for the difference in what languages oblige their speakers to convey rather than in what they allow them to convey. In this particular case, the relevant question is what habits of mind might develop in speakers of Guugu Yimithirr because of the necessity to specify geographic directions whenever spatial information is to be communicated. When the question is framed in this way, the answer appears inescapable, but no less startling for all that. In order to speak Guugu Yimithirr, you need to know where the cardinal directions are at each and every moment of your waking life. You need to know exactly where the north, south, west, and east are, since otherwise you would not be able to impart the most basic information. It follows, therefore, that in order to be able to speak such a language, you need to have a compass in your mind, one that operates all the time, day and night, without lunch breaks or weekends. And as it so happens, the Guugu Yimithirr have exactly this kind of an infallible compass. They maintain their orientation with respect to the fixed cardinal directions at all times.

And the results of these experiments show that the preferred coordinate system in the language correlates strongly with the solutions the participants tend to pick. Speakers of egocentric languages like English overwhelmingly chose the egocentric solution, whereas speakers of geographic languages like Guugu Yimithirr and Tzeltal chose the geographic solution.

The African language Supyire from Mali has five genders: humans, big things, small things, collectives, and liquids. Bantu languages such as Swahili have up to ten genders, and the Australian language Ngan’gityemerri is said to have fifteen different genders, which include, among others, masculine human, feminine human, canines, non-canine animals, vegetables, drinks, and two different genders for spears (depending on size and material).

The Greeks treat their women a little better: while their word for girl, korítsi, is, just as you would expect, of the neuter gender, if one speaks about a pretty buxom girl, one adds the augmentative suffix -aros, and the resulting noun, korítsaros, “buxom girl,” then belongs to the . . . masculine gender.

In Gurr-goni, for example, the vegetable gender came to include the noun “airplane” through a perfectly natural sequence of little steps: the original “vegetable” gender marker must first have been extended to plants more generally, and hence to all kinds of wooden objects. Since canoes are made of wood, another natural step would have included them in the vegetable gender as well. Since canoes happened to be the main means of transport for the speakers of Gurr-goni, the vegetable gender was then widened to include means of transportation more generally. And so, when the borrowed word erriplen entered the language, it was quite naturally assigned to the vegetable gender. Each step in this chain was natural and made perfect sense in its own local context. But the end result seems entirely arbitrary.

lucubrations.

The more interesting results emerged when the reaction time of the Russian speakers turned out to depend not just on the objective distance between the shades but also on the borderline between siniy and goluboy! Suppose the upper square was siniy (dark blue), but immediately on the border with goluboy (light blue). If the odd square out was two shades along toward the light direction (and thus across the border into goluboy), the average time it took the Russians to press the button was significantly shorter than if the odd square out was the same objective distance away—two shades along—but toward the dark direction, and thus another shade of siniy. When English speakers were tested with exactly the same setup, no such skewing effect was detected in their reaction times. The border between “light blue” and “dark blue” made no difference, and the only relevant factor for their reaction times was the objective distance between the shades.

If we project the function of these two areas back to the results of the first (purely visual) task, it becomes clear that when the brain has to decide whether two colors look the same or not, the circuits responsible for visual perception ask the language circuits for help in making the decision, even if no speaking is involved. So for the first time, there is now direct neurophysiologic evidence that areas of the brain that are specifically responsible for name finding are involved with the processing of purely visual color information.

This book set out to show, through the evidence supplied by language, that fundamental aspects of our thought are influenced by the cultural conventions of our society, to a much greater extent than is fashionable to admit today.

We saw examples from three areas of language: spatial coordinates and their consequences for memory patterns and orientation, grammatical gender and its impact on associations, and the concepts of color, which can increase our sensitivity to certain color distinctions.