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The fact that different languages seem to break up the world into categories differently has long been observed. The famous Italian proverb Traddutore, traditore (“Translator, traitor”) is a recognition of how different a translation is from an original. It is trivially true that individual words often do not line up perfectly (examples.), but are there broader, structural features in which the differences may be more important?
Early on, the interest of anthropologists focused on the problem of non-comparable categories in connection with their study of the aboriginal North American languages. Benjamin Lee Whorf, in a series of famous studies of the Hopi language of the American Southwest tried to demonstrate that human thought is, to a surprising extent, a product of the categories of language.
This fact [i.e., that different languages organize the world differently] is very significant for modern science, for it means that no individual is free to describe with absolute impartiality but is constrained to certain modes of interpretation even while he thinks himself almost free. The person most nearly free in such respects would be a linguist familiar with very many widely different linguistic systems. As yet no linguist is in any such position. We are thus introduced to a new principle of relativity, which holds that all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated. [Whorf 1940:214]
Most multilingual people have some sense of resonance with Whorf’s insight. One of my graduate-school mentors was Turkish and reported that when he thought about a problem in Turkish he sometimes came to a different conclusion than when he thought about it in English. Similarly when someone at a conference heard me speak both in Esperanto and in English in 2019, he exclaimed, “You seem like an entirely different person when you speak English!”
Many speakers of Esperanto report seeing the world slightly differently through Zamenhof’s creation from the way they do in their native language. But how can researchers investigate such a thing? Important as such a finding might be, further research has not yet been able to substantiate Whorf’s position in detail.
Needed Information. It seems clear that any language requires that we note certain features of our surroundings because we need to do so in order to use the language to talk about them (as noting whether the rice has been cooked yet in Taiwanese), but it is not as clear that this precludes noting features of our surroundings that our language does not require us to use.
For example, some years back when I was driving down a crowded and icy street, the following conversation (or one very like it) occurred:
My passenger: Watch it! She’s pulling out!
Myself (after hitting the brakes): You mean “he”; the driver’s a man.
The sex of the driver of the other car was entirely irrelevant to the situation, yet my passenger was required to select the pronoun “he” or the pronoun “she.” When he (or she) chose wrong, I corrected him (or her) before I even thought about it. The nature of English is such that sex (even when wrapped in winter coats and automobiles) must be correctly observed and reported.
On the other hand, if we had been speaking Swahili, which does not require a choice comparable to the he/she choice in English in that sentence, it is perfectly possible that we might have noted anyway that the driver was male, although we wouldn’t have “needed” the information. But how can a researcher know whether it would have been noticed anyway?
Some studies have shown that people seem to remember colors more accurately when the colors can be conveniently named in their language and less accurately when the colors are not distinctively named. This suggests that memory may involve linguistic coding of information and, therefore, that language can perhaps affect remembering more generally.
But the most provocative aspect of Whorf’s original idea is his notion that the structure of a language itself —its treatment of time, for example, or of probability or desirability of events— can affect how its speakers see the world.
One of the most provocative explorations of this possibility outside the realm of vocabulary was undertaken by Harold Bloom, who was developing social survey questionnaires in Hong Kong when he noticed that Chinese respondents had particular difficulty manipulating “counterfactual” statements —the kind of the form “if the government were to do this, then would the result be that?”
His guess about the explanation was that English has verb forms devoted to such statements (e.g., “if … would …,” “if … could …,” “if … had … then … would have …”) that were lacking in Chinese, which changed the intellectual task of processing them.
English verb forms make it easy to say, “If a sphere were a cube it would have corners.” In Chinese one must say, “A sphere is not a cube; if a sphere is a cube, it has corners.” The example is mine, not Bloom’s, but it illustrates why the protest, “but a sphere is not a cube” is an objection more readily raised by Sinophone than by Anglophone speakers.
When the English speakers hears the sentence “If you had warned them earlier, perhaps the accident would have been avoided,” he is left with the cognitive burden of having to resolve what kind of warning might have been effective, how effective it is likely to have been, how responsible he personally should feel for the fact that the warning was not given, etc.; but he is not left with the burden of having to resolve that the sentence is counterfactual. The labels “had … would have” signal to him directly and unambiguously that a counterfactual interpretation is intended. And his language has already prepared him, through its use of those labels, to interpret directly , as a single unit, without requiring any further cognitive act, the integration of negated premise and implication based upon it. For the English speaker, the couterfactuality of a sentence constitutes, as it were, one of the elementary components on the basis of which he constructs his interpretation of the sentence heard, while for the Chinese speaker it constitutes one of the results of his interpretive act. [Bloom 1981: 21].
Eventually Bloom constructed a number of experiments in which texts and questions —essentially multiple-choice tests— containing counterfactuals were presented to groups of students and non-students in the United States, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, and the differences in performance were not only statistically significant, but often far more extreme than he predicted.
On the other hand, Chinese seemed to equip its speakers especially well to manipulate “implicational” statements, terminologically distinguishing “if” (jiǎrú 假如) when the speaker thinks something is unlikely, from “if” (rúguǒ 如果) which carries no implication of what the speaker thinks about it. Furthermore,
… English speakers do not normally differentiate between “if-then” and “if-and-only-if-then” interpretations of implication sentences. For example, the English sentence “If China conquers Swat, it will acquire a new summer resort” leaves ambiguous whether this is the only means by which China could acquire such a resort (the if-and-only-if interpretation) or whether, in fact, there is a chance that China might acquire one by some other means; while the equivalent Chinese sentence, by making use of alternative forms of the word “then” (cái 才 [only if-then] vs jiù 就 [then]) makes the distinction clear. …
[Bloom 1981:15-16, Chinese transcriptions updated & characters added. Comment.]
Bloom also examined Chinese-English differences in the treatment of abstract as against concrete ideas in pairs of words like sincere/sincerity or hard/hardness and once again found statistically significant differences that he attributed to the ready use of English suffixes used to create abstract nouns, as contrasted to the comparative infrequency of such structures in Chinese.
… when an English speaker adds ‘-ity,” “-ness,” “-ance,” “-tion,” “-ment,” “-age” to talk of “sincerity,” “redness,” “importance,” and “abstraction,” of “the committee’s ‘acceptance’ of that proposal,” of “John’s ‘discovery’ of that ancient theory,” of “the proliferation’ of nuclear arms,” or of “Joan’s ‘generalization’ of the argument from one context to another,” he talks of properties and actions as if they were things; he converts in effect what are, in his baseline model of reality, characteristics of things and [of] acts … into things in themselves —and by means of such entification, ascends to a more conceptually detached way of dividing up the world. [Bloom 1981: 37]
It was not his argument that English had greater expressive subtlety than Chinese or vice versa, but rather that methodical experiment could show the influence of language on thinking in ways beyond simple vocabulary. (Unfortunately some readers believed that the work made the Chinese language seem “inferior” to English and that the findings were therefore “racist,” and necessarily incorrect.)
It would go beyond the scope of this essay to discuss how Zamenhof’s Esperanto would appear if there were monolingual Esperanto speakers who could take such tests as Bloom used to compare Chinese and English. In general, Esperanto is very European, of course. (The only non-European language Zamenhof knew was Hebrew.) But most of its fluent speakers report that it is still requires some cognitive readjustment from its learners. It appears that any language does.
Review Quiz Over Chapters IV-V
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