The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (7 page)

Fluent grammatical language can in fact appear in many kinds of people with severe intellectual impairments, like schizophrenics, Alzheimer’s patients, some autistic children, and some aphasics. One of the most fascinating syndromes recently came to light when the parents of a retarded girl with chatterbox syndrome in San Diego read an article about Chomsky’s theories in a popular science magazine and called him at MIT, suggesting that their daughter might be of interest to him. Chomsky is a paper-and-pencil theoretician who wouldn’t know Jabba the Hutt from the Cookie Monster, so he suggested that the parents bring their child to the laboratory of the psycholinguist Ursula Bellugi in La Jolla.

Bellugi, working with colleagues in molecular biology, neurology, and radiology, found that the child (whom they called Crystal), and a number of others they have subsequently tested, had a rare form of retardation called Williams syndrome. The syndrome seems to be associated with a defective gene on chromosome 11 involved in the regulation of calcium, and it acts in complex ways on the brain, skull, and internal organs during development, though no one knows why it has the effects it does. The children have an unusual appearance: they are short and slight, with narrow faces and broad foreheads, flat nasal bridges, sharp chins, star-shaped patterns in their irises, and full lips. They are sometimes called “elfin-faced” or “pixie people,” but to me they look more like Mick Jagger. They are significantly retarded, with an IQ of about 50, and are incompetent at ordinary tasks like tying their shoes, finding their way, retrieving items from a cupboard, telling left from right, adding two numbers, drawing a bicycle, and suppressing their natural tendency to hug strangers. But like Denyse they are fluent, if somewhat prim, conversationalists. Here are two transcripts from Crystal when she was eighteen:

Laboratory tests confirm the impression of competence at grammar; the children understand complex sentences, and fix up ungrammatical sentences, at normal levels. And they have an especially charming quirk: they are fond of unusual words. Ask a normal child to name some animals, and you will get the standard inventory of pet store and barnyard: dog, cat, horse, cow, pig. Ask a Williams syndrome child, and you get a more interesting menagerie: unicorn, pteranodon, yak, ibex, water buffalo, sea lion, saber-tooth tiger, vulture, koala, dragon, and one that should be especially interesting to paleontologists, “brontosaurus rex.” One eleven-year-old poured a glass of milk into the sink and said, “I’ll have to evacuate it”; another handed Bellugi a drawing and announced, “Here, Doc, this is in remembrance of you.”

People like Kirupano, Larry, the Hawaiian-born papaya grower, Mayela, Simon, Aunt Mae, Sarah, Mr. Ford, the K’s, Denyse, and Crystal constitute a field guide to language users. They show that complex grammar is displayed across the full range of human habitats. You don’t need to have left the Stone Age; you don’t need to be middle class; you don’t need to do well in school; you don’t even need to be old enough for school. Your parents need not bathe you in language or even command a language. You don’t need the intellectual wherewithal to function in society, the skills to keep house and home together, or a particularly firm grip on reality. Indeed, you can possess all these advantages and still not be a competent language user, if you lack just the right genes or just the right bits of brain.

The year 1984 has come and gone, and it is losing its connotation of the
totalitarian nightmare of George Orwell’s 1949 novel. But relief may be premature. In an appendix to
Nineteen Eighty-four
, Orwell wrote of an even more ominous date. In 1984, the infidel Winston Smith had to be converted with imprisonment, degradation, drugs, and torture; by 2050, there would be no Winston Smiths. For in that year the ultimate technology for thought control would be in place: the language Newspeak.

But there is a straw of hope for human freedom: Orwell’s caveat “at least so far as thought is dependent on words.” Note his equivocation: at the end of the first paragraph, a concept is unimaginable and therefore nameless; at the end of the second, a concept is nameless and therefore unimaginable.
Is
thought dependent on words? Do people literally think in English, Cherokee, Kivunjo, or, by 2050, Newspeak? Or are our thoughts couched in some silent medium of the brain—a language of thought, or “mentalese”—and merely clothed in words whenever we need to communicate them to a listener? No question could be more central to understanding the language instinct.

In much of our social and political discourse, people simply assume that words determine thoughts. Inspired by Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language,” pundits accuse governments of manipulating our minds with euphemisms like
pacification
(bombing),
revenue enhancement
(taxes), and
nonretention
(firing). Philosophers argue that since animals lack language, they must also lack consciousness—Wittgenstein wrote, “A dog could not have the thought ‘perhaps it will rain tomorrow’”—and therefore they do not possess the rights of conscious beings. Some feminists blame sexist thinking on sexist language, like the use of
he
to refer to a generic person. Inevitably, reform movements have sprung up. Many replacements for
he
have been suggested over the years, including
E, hesh, po, tey, co, jhe, ve, xe, he’er, thon
, and
na
. The most extreme of these movements is General Semantics, begun in 1933 by the engineer Count Alfred Korzybski and popularized in long-time best-sellers by his disciples Stuart Chase and S.I. Hayakawa. (This is the same Hayakawa who later achieved notoriety as the protest-defying college president and snoozing U.S. senator.) General Semantics lays the blame for human folly on insidious “semantic damage” to thought perpetrated by the structure of language. Keeping a forty-year-old in prison for a theft he committed as a teenager assumes that the forty-year-old John and the eighteen-year-old John are “the same person,” a cruel logical error that would be avoided if we referred to them not as
John
but as
John
₁₉₇₂
and
John
₁₉₉₄
, respectively. The verb
to be
is a particular source of illogic, because it identifies individuals with abstractions, as in
Mary is a woman
, and licenses evasions of responsibility, like Ronald Reagan’s famous nonconfession
Mistakes were made
. One faction seeks to eradicate the verb altogether.

And supposedly there is a scientific basis for these assumptions: the famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic determinism, stating that people’s thoughts are determined by the categories made available by their language, and its weaker version, linguistic relativity, stating that differences among languages cause differences in the thoughts of their speakers. People who remember little else from their college education can rattle off the factoids: the languages that carve the spectrum into color words at different places, the fundamentally different Hopi concept of time, the dozens of Eskimo words for snow. The implication is heavy: the foundational categories of reality are not “in” the world but are imposed by one’s culture (and hence can be challenged, perhaps accounting for the perennial appeal of the hypothesis to undergraduate sensibilities).

But it is wrong, all wrong. The idea that thought is the same thing as language is an example of what can be called a conventional absurdity: a statement that goes against all common sense but that everyone believes because they dimly recall having heard it somewhere and because it is so pregnant with implications. (The “fact” that we use only five percent of our brains, that lemmings commit mass suicide, that the
Boy Scout Manual
annually outsells all other books, and that we can be coerced into buying by subliminal messages are other examples.) Think about it. We have all had the experience of uttering or writing a sentence, then stopping and realizing that it wasn’t exactly what we meant to say. To have that feeling, there has to be a “what we meant to say” that is different from what we said. Sometimes it is not easy to find
any
words that properly convey a thought. When we hear or read, we usually remember the gist, not the exact words, so there has to be such a thing as a gist that is not the same as a bunch of words. And if thoughts depended on words, how could a new word ever be coined? How could a child learn a word to begin with? How could translation from one language to another be possible?

The discussions that assume that language determines thought carry on only by a collective suspension of disbelief. A dog, Bertrand Russell noted, may not be able to tell you that its parents were honest though poor, but can anyone really conclude from this that the dog is
unconscious?
(Out cold? A zombie?) A graduate student once argued with me using the following deliciously backwards logic: language must affect thought, because if it didn’t, we would have no reason to fight sexist usage (apparently, the fact that it is offensive is not reason enough). As for government euphemism, it is contemptible not because it is a form of mind control but because it is a form of lying. (Orwell was quite clear about this in his masterpiece essay.) For example, “revenue enhancement” has a much broader meaning than “taxes,” and listeners naturally assume that if a politician had meant “taxes” he would have said “taxes.” Once a euphemism is pointed out, people are not so brainwashed that they have trouble understanding the deception. The National Council of Teachers of English annually lampoons government doublespeak in a widely reproduced press release, and calling attention to euphemism is a popular form of humor, like the speech from the irate pet store customer in
Monty Python’s Flying Circus:

As we shall see in this chapter, there is no scientific evidence that languages dramatically shape their speakers’ ways of thinking. But I want to do more than review the unintentionally comical history of attempts to prove that they do. The idea that language shapes thinking seemed plausible when scientists were in the dark about how thinking works or even how to study it. Now that cognitive scientists know how to think about thinking, there is less of a temptation to equate it with language just because words are more palpable than thoughts. By understanding
why
linguistic determinism is wrong, we will be in a better position to understand how language itself works when we turn to it in the next chapters.

The linguistic determinism hypothesis is closely linked to the names Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. Sapir, a brilliant linguist, was a student of the anthropologist Franz Boas. Boas and his students (who also include Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead) were important intellectual figures in this century, because they argued that nonindustrial peoples were not primitive savages but had systems of language, knowledge, and culture as complex and valid in their world view as our own. In his study of Native American languages Sapir noted that speakers of different languages have to pay attention to different aspects of reality simply to put words together into grammatical sentences. For example, when English speakers decide whether or not to put -
ed
onto the end of a verb, they must pay attention to tense, the relative time of occurrence of the event they are referring to and the moment of speaking. Wintu speakers need not bother with tense, but when they decide which suffix to put on their verbs, they must pay attention to whether the knowledge they are conveying was learned through direct observation or by hearsay.

Sapir’s interesting observation was soon taken much farther. Whorf was an inspector for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company and an amateur scholar of Native American languages, which led him to take courses from Sapir at Yale. In a much-quoted passage, he wrote:

What led Whorf to this radical position? He wrote that the idea first occurred to him in his work as a fire prevention engineer when he was struck by how language led workers to misconstrue dangerous situations. For example, one worker caused a serious explosion by tossing a cigarette into an “empty” drum that in fact was full of gasoline vapor. Another lit a blowtorch near a “pool of water” that was really a basin of decomposing tannery waste, which, far from being “watery,” was releasing inflammable gases. Whorf’s studies of American languages strengthened his conviction. For example, in Apache,
It is a dripping spring
must be expressed “As water, or springs, whiteness moves downward.” “How utterly unlike our way of thinking!” he wrote.

But the more you examine Whorf’s arguments, the less sense they make. Take the story about the worker and the “empty” drum. The seeds of disaster supposedly lay in the semantics of
empty
, which, Whorf claimed, means both “without its usual contents” and “null and void, empty, inert.” The hapless worker, his conception of reality molded by his linguistic categories, did not distinguish between the “drained” and “inert” senses, hence, flick…boom! But wait. Gasoline vapor is invisible. A drum with nothing but vapor in it looks just like a drum with nothing in it at all. Surely this walking catastrophe was fooled by his eyes, not by the English language.

The example of whiteness moving downward is supposed to show that the Apache mind does not cut up events into distinct objects and actions. Whorf presented many such examples from Native American languages. The Apache equivalent of
The boat is grounded on the beach
is “It is on the beach pointwise as an event of canoe motion.”
He invites people to a feast
becomes “He, or somebody, goes for eaters of cooked food.”
He cleans a gun with a ramrod
is translated as “He directs a hollow moving dry spot by movement of tool.” All this, to be sure, is utterly unlike our way of talking. But do we know that it is utterly unlike our way of thinking?