From the blog of Nicholas C. Rossis, author of science fiction, the Pearseus epic fantasy series and children's books

by MandMX.com

Noam Chomsky is famous for his suggestion that language shapes the way we think. Put very simply, we have no concept of anything we can’t describe with words. He also believes there is a universal grammar that all humans instinctively adhere to.

Although I personally think he overstates his case, there’s no doubt in my mind that language does influence our perception of the world. Perhaps this is because I’m a non-native speaker, so I can see subtly changes in me when I switch from Greek to English. Friends have even claimed that my very voice sounds different. As Sue Vincent put it in her comment, there is a subtle and unspoken shading in words. A native speaker has an emotional attachment to words that never makes it into the dictionary and which can convey far more than just a grammatically correct combination of words alone can ever do.

Anyway, I came across this great post on Nautil.us – 5 Languages That Could Change the Way You See the World, which led to this post. As always, I encourage you to check out the original post as well – this one is peppered with links to the original research, so it can serve as a nice point of reference.

An English-centered view of the world

I went to my neighbor’s house for something to eat yesterday.

Think about this sentence. It’s pretty simple—English speakers would know precisely what it means. But what does it actually tell you—or, more to the point, what does it not tell you? It doesn’t specify facts like the subject’s gender or the neighbor’s, or what direction the speaker traveled, or the nature of the neighbors’ relationship, or whether the food was a cookie or a curry. English doesn’t require speakers to give any of that information, but if the sentence were in Greek, the gender of every person involved would be specified.

From the blog of Nicholas C. Rossis, author of science fiction, the Pearseus epic fantasy series and children's books

by Tom Marks

The way that different languages convey information has fascinated linguists, anthropologists, and psychologists for decades. In the 1940s, a chemical engineer called Benjamin Lee Whorf published a wildly popular paper in the MIT Technology Review (pdf) that claimed the way languages express different concepts—like gender, time, and space—influenced the way its speakers thought about the world. For example, if a language didn’t have terms to denote specific times, speakers wouldn’t understand the concept of time flowing.

This argument was later discredited, as researchers concluded that it overstated language’s constraints on our minds. But researchers later found more nuanced ways that these habits of speech can affect our thinking. The primary way language influences our minds is through what it forces us to think about—not what it prevents us from thinking about.

Here are five examples that reveal how information can be expressed in extremely different ways, and how these habits of thinking can affect us.

A Language Where You’re Not the Center of the World

English speakers and others are highly egocentric when it comes to orienting themselves in the world. Objects and people exist to the left, right, in front, and to the back of you. You move forward and backward in relation to the direction you are facing. For an aboriginal tribe in Australia called the Guugu Ymithirr, such a “me me me” approach to spatial information makes no sense. Instead, they use cardinal directions to express spatial information. So rather than “Can you move to my left?” they would say “Can you move to the west?

Guugu Ymithirr speakers have a kind of “internal compass” that is imprinted from an extremely young age (if you’re interested in reading an actual compass, check out this guide and this one if you’re looking for tips on map reading). In the same way that English-speaking infants learn to use different tenses when they speak, so their children learn to orient themselves along compass lines, not relative to themselves. In fact, if a Guugu Ymithirr speaker wants to direct your attention to the direction behind him, he points through himself, as if he were thin air and his own existence were irrelevant.

Other studies have shown that speakers of languages that use cardinal directions to express locations have fantastic spatial memory and navigation skills—perhaps because their experience of an event is so well-defined by the directions it took place in.

A Language Where Time Flows East to West

In another study, language also seemed to affect a speaker’s interpretation of time. In a series of experiments, the linguists had Kuuk Thaayorre speakers – another Australian aboriginal language – put a sequential series of cards in order—one which showed a man aging, another of a crocodile growing, and of a person eating a banana.

The speakers were sat at tables during the experiment, once facing south, and another time facing north. Regardless of which direction they were facing, all speakers arranged the cards in order from east to west—the same direction the sun’s path takes through the sky as the day passes. By contrast, English speakers doing the same experiment always arranged the cards from left to right—the direction in which we read.

For the Kuuk Thaayorre speakers, the passage of time was intimately tied to the cardinal directions. The researchers never told anyone which direction they were facing. The Kuuk Thaayorre knew that already and spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time.

A Language Where Colors Are Metaphors

Humans see the world within a certain spectrum of light, and, all individual languages were thought to have a set of specific color terms that partition the visible color spectrum. The theory of “basic color terms” argued that all languages had at least terms for black, white, red, and warm or cold colors.

Not so in Yélî Dnye. Spoken by a Papua New Guinea tribe, this is quite dissimilar to other neighboring language groups. It has little specific color terminology—indeed, there is no word for “color.” Instead, speakers talk about color as part of a metaphorical phrase, with color terms derived from words for objects in the islander’s environment.

For example, to describe something as red, islanders say “like the (red) parrot.” The word for black comes from the word for night. Not only that, but the islander’s grammar reinforces this metaphorical slant, saying, “The skin of the man is like the (white) parrot,” rather than “He is white.”

A Language That Makes You Provide Evidence

In Peru, the Matses people speak with great care, making sure that every single piece of information they communicate is true as far as they know at the time of speaking. Each uttered sentence follows a different verb form depending on how you know the information you are imparting, and when you last knew it to be true.

For example, if you are asked, “How many apples do you have?” then a Matses speaker might answer, “I had four apples last time I checked my fruit basket.” Regardless of how sure the speaker is that they still have four apples, if they can’t see them, then they have no evidence what they are saying is true—for all they know, a thief could have stolen three of the apples, and the information would be incorrect.

The language has a huge array of specific terms for information such as facts that have been inferred in the recent and distant past, conjectures about different points in the past, and information that is being recounted as a memory.

What distinguishes Matses from other languages that require speakers to give evidence for what they are saying is that Matses has one set of verb endings for the source of the knowledge and another, separate way of conveying how true, or valid the information is, and how certain they are about it.

Interestingly, there is no way of denoting that a piece of information is hearsay, myth, or history. Instead, speakers impart this kind of information as a quote, or else as being information that was inferred within the recent past.

A Language That Has No Word for “Two”

The Pirahã people are an indigenous tribe living in the Amazon. They speak a language without numbers, color terms, perfect form, or basic quantity terms like “few” or “some”—supposed by some, like color, to be an universal aspect of human language. Instead of using words like “each” and “more” or numbered amounts to give information about quantity, Pirahã said whether something was big or small. There is a word that roughly translates as “many,” but really it means “to bring together.” The Pirahã also had no artistic tradition, and voiced no sense of deep memory.

As this directly contradicts Chomsky’s theory of a universal grammar, the Pirahã have been studied extensively since their discovery, in 2005. In a series of experiments, the Pirahã’s cognition has been tested over and again: Is number cognition possible without a numerical system? The answer appears to be “not really.”

In one experiment, the Pirahã were shown rows of batteries, and asked to replicate the rows. They were able to recreate rows containing two or three batteries, but nothing above that. Instead of counting, the Pirahã used an estimation strategy, which worked well for them up to a certain point. It may be that the Pirahã have never actually needed to count in order to get by—and the linguists who have observed the Pirahã in the field certainly think this is the case.

Interestingly, the Pirahã don’t seem to have a very high opinion of outsiders. They are monolingual, preferring to stick with their own lexicon rather than borrow words from English or Spanish, and they call all other languages, “crooked head.” It is a sharp contrast to our society, based on globalized languages and all manner of communication translated into nothing but numbers—endless streams of 1s and 0s.

Further Reading

These book links below are courtesy of Connie Flanagan:

  • Sign Language and the Brain: a Review, by Ruth Campbell, Mairéad MacSweeney and Dafydd Waters. A book dealing with the question of how signed languages are processed by the brain.
  • Seeing Voices, by Oliver Sacks, MD. A journey into the world of the deaf.
  • The Island of the Colorblind, by Oliver Sacks, MD. An exploration of a society where total congenital colorblindness is the norm.

While you’re pondering the merits of a world without algebra, why not enjoy my children’s book, Runaway Smile for free?