Do the languages we speak influence the way we think and perceive the world?
Jamie Scott It is fascinating to consider the possibility that our mother tongue frames our thinking, opening up tantalizing questions such as ‘does a Chinese person perceive time differently given they have no future tense?’. This subject, known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, is of the utmost importance both scientifically and spiritually, as such an insight would aid the fields of psychiatric medicine and artificial intelligence amongst others. In this essay, I shall attempt to provide an answer to this question by calling upon a variety of sources and empirical tests. To gain more insight into the subject, I shall unusually 1 try to place both neurological and bilingual elements in my argument. Many have argued that languages actually limit our thoughts, whether through lack of terms for a concept or grammatical complexity with which to express it. It is true that some languages are less complex than others. English appears far superior to Akkadian 2 through its ability to create relative clauses (the tree, which was tall…), however, at most a lack of grammatical complexity merely makes for clunky expression as opposed to a barrier to thought. Vocabulary is no hindrance to languages either, as words 3 can be borrowed from others. We can therefore safely agree that language does not constrain our ability to think about the world and understand concepts. That said, it may restrict the expression of some concepts as in the case of noun gender, 4 a common trait among languages. 5 consider heinrich heine’s poem ‘a palm tree’, in which a snowy (masculine) pine tree yearns for a hot (female) palm tree. In English the male-female love dynamic is removed, severely atrophying the depth and content of the poem. Though language may not limit our thoughts, it may influence them. This would manifest itself most significantly in cognitive structuring, how our brain categorizes concepts. To return to the aforementioned vocabulary as an example, the English ‘mind’ is subtly different from the French ‘esprit’. Clearly similar words are placed in subtly different linguistic categories, and I would argue that it places a subtle twist on our perception of these concepts. As a more extreme example, in the Nootka language if a rock falls no distinction is made between the rock and the act of falling. This may seem bizarre, but it is more or less equivalent to the English expression ‘it rains’. Scientific testing also proves this influence, as John Lucy showed that depending on how much their second language was used, Japanese-English bilinguals showed more preference to the way of classifying objects in that language (English by shape, Japanese by material). 6 An even more extreme example of this is that in Hebrew one writes from right to left, causing a perception of time in the 1 This ‘priming’ is in fact a significant phenomenon in our daily lives; for example, people will genuinely feel happier when asked to tell a happy story. 2 A translated extract from an Akkadian legal document: ‘Ubarum told Iribum to take Kuli’s field. He on his own initiative took the field of Bazi. Ubarum didn’t know. He proved (this against) him in front of the inspectors.’ while in English: ‘Ubarum told Iribum to take Kuli’s field, and proved to the inspectors that he didn’t know that Iribum took the field from Bazi.’ This shows higher complexity in English in that we regularly employ relative clauses (e.g. he said that…), while Akkadian must use not one sentence, but several back to back to express this idea. 3 In fact a sizeable chunk of English is stolen from Latin and Greek, and come to it French, Morse, Indian and others. The lack of a word for a single storey house did not stop us understanding the concept, or indeed pinching yet more from India, here the word ‘bungalow’ (this originally meant Bengal house). 4 Mark Twain famously ranted about ‘the awful German language’ and wrote the comical ‘tale of the fishwife and its sad fate’, which ridiculed the genders assigned to words in German (for example a fishwife is neuter). Conversely, we have the side-splitting German joke ‘what colour is the table? It is green’ (he’s actually masculine). 5 The vast majority of European languages have genders, meaning it is in fact English which is strange through its lack thereof. Given that the Australian language Ngan’ Gityemerri has no less than fifteen genders, we must paraphrase Guy Deutscher and Aunt Augusta and say to English: ‘to lose a gender once is unfortunate, twice is careless’. 6 This change in perception and categorization is known as cognitive shift.
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