Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue (18 page)

 

Interesting that a culture would choose those highly particular aspects of experience to assign words to. Or is it?—I actually dissembled there. The language with words for those concepts is good old English; namely,
bonding, funk, reconciliation, consummate,
and
hover
.

Upon which now we can take a look at what the Boro words actually mean:

 

Abley’s idea is that to speak Boro is to be uniquely attuned to these concepts. However, when speakers of a language are asked what a word means, quite often they give particular uses that happen to be especially common, rather than the larger concept the word technically covers. For example, if someone asked you what
consummate
meant, you would likely give the sexual meaning, although you technically know that
consummate
means, more generally, “to bring to the highest level.” “What’s bonding?” someone asks you. You might say “When things stick together.” But you also might say “When you first feel a click with someone, like guys bonding over sports.”

This is surely a lot of what is behind the Boro verbs. After all, English has ways of expressing many of those concepts. “To create a pinching sensation in the armpit” can be expressed in English as
cinch
up into—and is
egthu
in Boro used exclusively with armpits, or was that what the consulted speaker most readily mentioned? To pick an object up with care in English can be to
pluck
it out. We have no verb for “to be fat as a child” but we have a noun,
baby fat,
which refers to exactly what the Boro word does, except not as a verb. The issue is not what part of speech people happen to express a concept in, but whether their language “feels” it. Well, on babies’ fat, English feels it, as do quite certainly all languages on earth.

In the same way, we have no verb like
asusu
for not feeling at home, but we have positive adjectives like
acclimated
and
situated
—
I wasn’t situated yet and so I was still calling home every night
. English speakers are attuned to the same mental state that Boro speakers are when they
asusu
.

And even where Boro really does have a word marking a fine shade of human experience that English does not—I draw a blank on an English equivalent to “pretend to love”—it still doesn’t follow that this experience is more deeply felt by them than the rest of us.

Looking at our own language is an especially effective way of truly getting this. In English, something in spot four is
four
th,
in spot seven is
seven
th,
in spot eight is
eigh
th,
and so on. Only the first three numbers are distorted in a major way:
first
and
second
don’t correspond to
one
and
two
at all, and
third
clearly has
three
in there, but beaten up a bit, and what’s with the -
rd
? There’s no
sixrd
or
tenrd
.

Well, that’s something else weird about English and European languages. Most of the world’s languages have a special word for the first spot, like
first
, but then just say, as it were, “two-th,” “three-th.” So English’s
second
, Spanish’s
segundo
, and Russian’s
vtoroj
(when
two
is
dva
) mean that these languages channel our European language speakers’ thoughts into a heightened awareness of secondness, I suppose. That is, an English, Spanish, or Russian speaker is more sensitive to things being second than a German, a Turk, an Inuit, or an Israeli . . . Come on. We just happen to have a distinct word marking secondness; the Boro just happen to have a word for pretending to love.

Among academics and beyond, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been, quite commonly, less examined than embraced. One of the reasons: what interests many about the hypothesis is less what it would imply for academic issues about human psychology than its demonstration that indigenous cultures are not “primitive,” and in fact may have some things on us.

This was an explicit mission of Sapir, and an invaluable one in itself. It is to him and like-minded thinkers of his time such as his mentor anthropologist Franz Boas that it is part of the warp and woof of modern Westerners to view other cultures as variations on being human rather than “savages.” Gone are the days when America could stampede into the Philippines as it did during the McKinley administration, casually assuming that the “natives” needed to be “civilized.”

Whorf inherited the diversity imperative from Sapir, and it permeates his writings on Hopi. To Whorf, Hopi and the world view it supposedly conditioned was not just different, but better:

 

We Westerners are obsessed with putting things into little boxes, drawing boundaries—the Hopi, however, are more in touch with higher realities:

 

The problem with this kind of thing is that too often it ends up, in essence, taking us back to the noble savage. Noble, to be sure, but in what we celebrate in them as special, savage—clothed chimpanzees, cute.

Mark Abley, for instance, seizes upon a grammatical quirk in the Native American languages of the Algonquian family, such as Cree, Ojibwa, and the Powhatan that Pocahontas spoke. In one of them, Montagnais, the way you say
You see me
is:

 

But the way to say
I see you
is not to put
I
before the verb and
you
after. That is, reversing the example above and doing
is wrong; it is not Montagnais at all, any more than
Reading book you a are
is English.

Instead, you use the
You see me
sentence, but stick a little syllable into it to make it mean
I see you
:

 

So—the basic sentence is about
you
; only with an adjustment can you make it about
I
. (That is, indeed, so deliciously odd from our Anglophone perspective. Once again, languages are interesting in their
grammars
as well as their words.)

Abley has it that this means that Algonquian language speakers are less self-centered than Europeans, and that “to speak properly, in an Algonquian language, is to be aware of the identities and interrelationships of all the people you address.” But when we are at a Thanksgiving dinner, are we English speakers not fully aware of who is who, despite that we can put
I
first?

Abley marvels at the fact that Native Americans are capable of carrying on conversations among multiple participants—which is like praising a culture for cooking food or, really, being more cognitively advanced than their pets.

And in any case, just as Whorf mischaracterized Hopi, Abley leaves out that in Algonquian languages,
I
can indeed come first.
You,
if there, does have to come first, but if there is no
you
around and the
I
is interacting with a
he
,
she, it,
or
they
, then
I
has to come first. In another Algonquian language, Cree,
I frighten them
is:

 

To say
They frighten me
you can’t put
they
first; you make
they
the subject by sticking in a special syllable:

 

It looks like Algonquians are just as narcissistic as we are when
I
am talking about
them
.

One episode that pointed up this fundamental commitment to ennobling The Other was the rare language-is-thought study that argued that English speakers are the more insightful ones. Alfred Bloom noted that in Chinese, one must engage in a certain amount of circumlocution to be explicit that something is hypothetical rather than real. In English we can say
If you saw my sister, you would know that she was pregnant.
But in Chinese, the sentence is rendered as “If you see my sister, you know she is pregnant.” For those who know Mandarin:

 

That sentence can have various meanings. One of them is neutral and not hypothetical:

 

Then there are hypothetical meanings, referring to something that has not happened or did not happen:

 

In Mandarin, context determines which meaning comes through.

Bloom did an experiment that showed Chinese speakers less alert to hypotheticality when reading stories in Chinese than English speakers reading the stories in English. On the basis of this, he supposed that since where people’s grammar is concerned, “the thought of the individual must run along its grooves” as the Whorfian I quoted above had it, Mandarin’s grooves must distract thought from the difference between reality and the hypothetical. What’s good for a perceptively challenged Modern English speaker is good for the man on the street in Beijing, right?

Apparently not: people shot at Bloom like he was a varmint. Their objections to details of his experimental procedure were reasonable, but more conclusive was their insistence that Chinese speakers process hypotheticality via context even if their grammar does not mark it as explicitly as English’s. Elsewhere, however, there is little interest in noting that, say, English speakers understand via context that
knowing
algebra is different from
knowing
the man next door, or that even if Hopi did have no tense markers, we could assume that its speakers processed that things happen before and after one another as vividly as we do. I feel reasonably confident in surmising that if Bloom’s study had shown some interpretational deficit among English speakers, no one would have batted an eye.

A speaker of American Sign Language captured the essence of how Whorfianism unintentionally demeans minority languages, mocking outsider fans of Sign. In an interview, the signer feigned “a vapid, rapt look on his face. ‘Sign language is so
beautiful
’, he signs, in a gushing mockery of the attitude that exoticizes sign and correspondingly reduces deaf people to the status of pets, mascots. ‘It’s just so
wonderful
that deaf people can
communicate
!’ ” Or, I would have it, “It’s just so
wonderful
that people who aren’t like us can
think
and
process reality
as richly as we do!”

Maybe that message had a certain value in Whorf’s era. In the thirties, popular culture and common consensus in America were still shot through with pitiless condescension toward “natives,” “Chinks,” “jungle bunnies.” But it’s been a while. We clap when our infants don’t spill their food. We can afford to let go of clapping when exotic folks don’t, when in our times, celebrating diversity is a shibboleth of moral legitimacy among thinking First World people, and considerably, if not comprehensively, beyond.

All
Homo sapiens
engage in advanced mentation—yes, hallelujah. However, this doesn’t make the Cree speaker a paragon of enlightened selflessness because
you
comes earlier than
I
in his way of saying
I see you
, any more than our ability to explicitly get across
If you’d have seen my
sister, you’d have known she was pregnant
makes us Anglophones wizards of truth versus falsity compared to people in China.

At this point, one might ask: does language channel thought at all? It is pretty clear that people speaking non-Western languages are not walking around in psychedelic dreamscapes channeling essences of The Real unknown to us “straights” marching around in business suits. However, is it really true that grammar has
nothing
to do with the way we think?

Of course not. These days there is research being done in what is often called the Neo-Whorfian School. No more of the mystic, anti-Western hocus-pocus—this is serious psychological research, based on a reasoned curiosity as to whether grammar can channel thought, albeit in ways less dramatic than the straight-up Whorfians were seeking. And there are, indeed, twinkles of evidence in favor of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Nothing mind-bending or kaleidoscopic—just twinkles.