Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages (40 page)

In the light of the experiments reported in this chapter, color may be the area that comes closest in reality to the metaphor of language as a lens. Of course, language is not a physical lens and does not affect the photons that reach the eye. But the sensation of color is produced in the brain, not the eye, and the brain does not take the signals from the retina at face value, as it is constantly engaged in a highly complex process of normalization, which creates an illusion of stable colors under different lighting conditions. The brain achieves this “instant fix” effect by shifting and stretching the signals from the retina, by exaggerating some differences while playing down others. No one knows exactly how the brain does all this, but what is clear is that it relies on past memories and on stored impressions. It has been shown, for instance, that a perfectly gray picture of a banana can appear slightly yellow to us, because the brain remembers bananas as yellow and so normalizes the sensation toward what it expects to see. (For further details, see the appendix.)

It is likely that the involvement of language with the perception of color takes place on this level of normalization and compensation, where the brain relies on its store of past memories and established distinctions in order to decide how similar certain colors are. And although no one knows yet what exactly goes on between the linguistic and the visual circuits, the evidence gathered so far amounts to a compelling argument that language does affect our visual sensation. In Kay and Kempton’s top-down experiment from 1984, English speakers insisted that shades across the green-blue border
looked
farther apart to them. The bottom-up approach of more recent experiments shows that the linguistic concepts of color are directly involved in the processing of visual information, and that they make people react to colors of different
names as if these were farther apart than they are objectively. Taken together, these results lead to a conclusion that few would have been prepared to believe just a few years ago: that speakers of different languages may perceive colors slightly differently after all.

In one sense, therefore, the color odyssey that Gladstone launched in 1858 has ended up, after a century and a half of peregrination, within spitting distance of his starting point. For in the end, it may well be that the Greeks did perceive colors slightly differently from us. But even if we have concluded the journey staring Gladstone right in the face, we are not entirely seeing eye to eye with him, because we have turned his story on its head and have reversed the direction of cause and effect in the relation between language and perception. Gladstone assumed that the difference between Homer’s color vocabulary and ours was a
result
of preexisting differences in color perception. But it now seems that the vocabulary of color in different languages can be the
cause
of differences in the perception of color. Gladstone thought that Homer’s unrefined color vocabulary was a reflection of the undeveloped state of his eye’s anatomy. We know that nothing has changed in the eye’s anatomy over the last millennia, and yet the habits of mind instilled by our more refined color vocabulary may have made us more sensitive to some fine color distinctions nonetheless.

More generally, the explanation for cognitive differences between ethnic groups has shifted over the last two centuries, from anatomy to culture. In the nineteenth century, it was generally assumed that there were significant inequalities between the hereditary mental faculties of different races, and that these biological inequalities were the main reason for their varying accomplishments. One of the jewels in the crown of the twentieth century was the recognition of the fundamental unity of mankind in all that concerns its cognitive endowment. So nowadays we no longer look primarily to the genes to explain variations in mental characteristics among ethnic groups. But in the twenty-first century, we are beginning to appreciate the differences in thinking that are imprinted by cultural conventions and, in particular, by speaking in different tongues.

Language has two lives. In its public role, it is a system of conventions agreed upon by a speech community for the purpose of effective communication. But language also has another, private existence, as a system of knowledge that each speaker has internalized in his or her own mind. If language is to serve as an effective means of communication, then the private systems of knowledge in speakers’ minds must closely correspond with the public system of linguistic conventions. And it is because of this correspondence that the public conventions of language can mirror what goes on in the most fascinating and most elusive object in the entire universe, our mind.

This book set out to show, through the evidence supplied by language, that fundamental aspects of our thought are influenced by the cultural conventions of our society, to a much greater extent than is fashionable to admit today. In the first part, it became clear that the way our language carves up the world into concepts has not just been determined for us by nature, and that what we find “natural” depends largely on the conventions we have been brought up on. That is not to say, of course, that each language can partition the world arbitrarily according
to its whim. But within the constraints of what is learnable and sensible for communication, the ways in which even the simplest concepts are delineated can vary to a far greater degree than what plain common sense would ever expect. For, ultimately, what common sense finds natural is what it is familiar with.

In the second part, we saw that the linguistic conventions of our society can affect aspects of our thought that go beyond language. The demonstrable impact of language on thinking is very different from what was touted in the past. In particular, no evidence has come to light that our mother tongue imposes limits on our intellectual horizons and constrains our ability to understand concepts or distinctions used in other languages. The real effects of the mother tongue are rather the habits that develop through the
frequent use
of certain ways of expression. The concepts we are trained to treat as distinct, the information our mother tongue continuously forces us to specify, the details it requires us to be attentive to, and the repeated associations it imposes on us—all these habits of speech can create habits of mind that affect more than merely the knowledge of language itself. We saw examples from three areas of language: spatial coordinates and their consequences for memory patterns and orientation, grammatical gender and its impact on associations, and the concepts of color, which can increase our sensitivity to certain color distinctions.

According to the dominant view among linguists and cognitive scientists today, the influence of language on thought can be considered significant only if it bears on genuine reasoning—if, for instance, one language can be shown to prevent its speakers from solving a logical problem that is easily solved by speakers of another language. Since no evidence for such constraining influence on logical reasoning has ever been presented, this necessarily means—or so the argument goes—that any remaining effects of language are insignificant and that fundamentally we all think in the same way.

But it is all too easy to exaggerate the importance of logical reasoning in our lives. Such an overestimation may be natural enough for those reared on a diet of analytic philosophy, where thought is practically equated with logic and any other mental processes are considered
beneath notice. But this view does not correspond with the rather modest role of logical thinking in our actual experience of life. After all, how many daily decisions do we make on the basis of abstract deductive reasoning, compared with those guided by gut feeling, intuition, emotions, impulse, or practical skills? How often have you spent your day solving logical conundrums, compared with wondering where you left your socks? Or trying to remember where your car is in a multilevel parking lot? How many commercials try to appeal to us through logical syllogisms, compared with those that play on colors, associations, allusions? And finally, how many wars have been fought over disagreements in set theory?

The influence of the mother tongue that has been demonstrated empirically is felt in areas of thought such as memory, perception, and associations or in practical skills such as orientation. And in our actual experience of life, such areas are no less important than the capacity for abstract reasoning, probably far more so.

The questions explored in this book are ages old, but the serious research on the subject is only in its infancy. Only in recent years, for example, have we understood the dire urgency to record and analyze the thousands of exotic tongues that are still spoken in remote corners of the globe, before they are all forsaken in favor of English, Spanish, and a handful of other dominant languages. Even in the recent past, it was still common for linguists to claim to have found a “universal of human language” after examining a certain phenomenon in a sample that consisted of English, Italian, and Hungarian, say, and finding that all of these three languages agreed. Today, it is clearer to most linguists that the only languages that can truly reveal what is natural and universal are the hosts of small tribal tongues that do things very differently from what we are used to. So a race against time is now under way to record as many of these languages as possible before all knowledge of them is lost forever.

The investigations into the possible links between the structure of society and the structure of the grammatical system are in a much
more embryonic stage. Having languished under the taboo of “equal complexity” for decades, the attempts to determine to what extent the complexity of various areas in grammar depends on the complexity of society are still mostly on the level of discovering the “how” and have barely began to address the “why.”

But above all, it is the investigation of the influence of language on thought that is only just beginning as a serious scientific enterprise. (Its history as a haven for fantasists is of much longer standing, of course.) The three examples I presented—space, gender, and color—seem to me the areas where the impact of language has been demonstrated most convincingly so far. Other areas have also been studied in recent years, but not enough reliable evidence has yet been presented to support them. One example is the marking of plurality. While English requires its speakers to mark the difference between singular and plural whenever a noun is mentioned, there are languages that do not routinely force such a distinction. It has been suggested that the necessity (or otherwise) to mark plurality affects the attention and memory patterns of speakers, but while this suggestion does not seem implausible in theory, conclusive evidence is still lacking.

No doubt further areas of language will be explored when our experimental tools become less blunt. What about an elaborate system of evidentiality, for example? Recall that Matses requires its speakers to supply detailed information about their source of knowledge for every event they describe. Can the habits of speech induced by such a language have a measurable effect on the speakers’ habits of mind beyond language? In years to come, questions such as this will surely become amenable to empirical study.

When one hears about acts of extraordinary bravery in combat, it is usually a sign that the battle has not been going terribly well. For when wars unfold according to plan and one’s own side is winning, acts of exceptional individual heroism are rarely called for. Bravery is required mostly by the desperate side.

The ingenuity and sophistication of some of the experiments we
have encountered is so inspiring that it is easy to mistake them for signs of great triumphs in science’s battle to conquer the fortress of the human brain. But, in reality, the ingenious inferences made in these experiments are symptoms not of great strength but of great weakness. For all this ingenuity is needed only because we know so little about how the brain works. Were we not profoundly ignorant, we would not need to rely on roundabout methods of gleaning information from measures such as reaction speed to various contrived tasks. If we knew more, we would simply observe directly what goes on in the brain and would then be able to determine precisely how nature and culture shape the concepts of language, or whether any parts of grammar are innate, or how exactly language affects any given aspect of thought.