by Madeleine KandoNot too long ago, people believed that the ability to see colors was a trait that was inherited over generations. Even as recently as 1858, the British statesman William Gladstone theorized that Homer must have been color-blind because his texts don’t mention the colors blue or green. He concluded that full-color vision had not yet developed in humans at that time.
People in the 1800’s still thought that physical changes during one’s life-time could be passed on to the next generation. In Rudyard Kipling's ‘Just So Stories', the elephant gets his long trunk because an alligator pulls and pulls on it, until it is permanently stretched. Every child understands that this is just a fairy tale and that we cannot pass on acquired characteristics to our off-spring. Even if you spend your entire life dieting, trying to make yourself thin as a rail, your children will not be born like anorexic models. The only reason elephants have long trunks is due to natural selection.
Many primitive tribes don’t have words for blue or purple. So the experts assumed that these people couldn’t see certain colors (nature) because their language (culture) didn’t have words for it.
English (as far as I know) doesn’t have a word for that part of the face that is between the nose and the mouth: does that mean that we don’t see it? That is what Gladstone said about Homer. He didn’t use the word ‘blue’, therefore he couldn’t see blue.
I have read somewhere that eskimos have many more words for 'white' than we do. Does that mean that they actually see more gradations of white? Does speaking ‘Eskimo’ change the way you see reality?
In French, everything is either feminine or masculine. ‘la lune’ (the moon), ‘le soleil’ (the sun) etc. I must confess that I assign a more masculine personality to the sun than to the moon. Is it because French is my first language and I learnt early on that everything in the world is either feminine and masculine? Does a particular language influence how we think? Are English speakers more egalitarian and less sexist because they only know things by the article ‘the’?
I know from personal experience that I feel like a different person depending on which language I speak. French forces me to be eloquent and poetic. When I speak Dutch something urges me to be practical and non-emotional. When I speak English I somehow relax, become a pragmatic and no b.s. type of person.
So, which is it? Does language determine how you see yourself and the world, or does the world around you determine how you use a certain language? Chomsky said that there is something universal about language and that is as basic as walking or breathing. Others talk about ‘linguistic relativity’, which means that the language you speak influences how you see things. I believe that it is both. What do you think? leave comment here
** If you are interested in this subject I recommend Guy Deutscher's 'Through The Language Glass'.
19 comments:
INSANITIES OF LANGUAGES
In Dutch, things are either ”de” or “het”, ( “de vrouw” = the woman, “de man” = the man, but they arbitrarily use a neutral article “het” for about half the nouns in their vocabulary. It seems the Dutch are not sexists but just like to make life unnecessarily complicated.
German is one of the most annoying of European languages. They have 3 articles: feminine, masculine and neutral (die, der, das). Contrary to the French, “Le soleil” and “la lune”, now suddenly the sun and moon have had sex swaps. It’s “die Sonne” = the sun, and “der Mond” = the moon. Perhaps, unlike the romantic French, Germans are more pragmatic? After all we would never see the moon without the sun lighting it up, would we? So better give the word it’s all nurturing, female gender? In addition, the German Language requires that all Nouns begin with a capital Letter! Why?
Give me simplicity and clarity any day. Most multilingual fluent English speakers prefer to use English. I always ask multilingual children which language they prefer to use and the answer is always English, even if it’s not their first language. “Why?” I ask. “It’s easier”, they say.
English is the least phonetic, least logical. Yet an English text of say 500 words, next to it’s French, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch or Scandinavian equivalent is always four to six lines shorter. Why? Because of it’s simpler grammar and richer vocabulary. In other words, English needs fewer words to express a thought.
Language is to humans as flight is to birds. they masters of the air and we masters of the symbolic. We render our world navigable in stories told to each other over and over again, never twice exactly the same but always within the channels of our shared experience. Rivers of story.
Our stories in language arise in the context of where and when we are and how we make our way in the world together. The romance languages reflect lives lived in villages, the power of the church and God, and the all-important subtleties of relations between differing classes and categories of people--"tu y usted".
The eskimo's language is wrought in their experience amid the vast inhospitable tundras and the bonds and etiquettes so necessary to survival. "Stay in my igloo, have dinner and enjoy my wife if you like."
The Hopi live in a world everlasting and ahistorical. As a people they have always been and will always be. The world is what it is and the role of tenses, past, present and future, are subordinated linguistically to the omnipresent now.
English is the language of empire and progress, always going somewhere better by some wondrous new means. The future rules the present and the past is only "history". It is the language of getting "things" done--conquering new lands, making new products, controlling the world as it is and remaking it as it ought be, amen.
American English is the epitome of forward motion and transformation. It mutates at a viral rate. In
So. Cal dreamin' everything's laid back "cool dude". In SF its all techno, "tweet me". In the South persists the politeness of genteel agrarian life, "Oh my". And in NYC it's cold, hard and abrasive--"Outta my way buddy. Whadaya stopid or somtin?
As we go about our lives we make our language and our language makes us. We have little choice in the matter. We tell stories about what matters and what matters is what we tell stories about. We are rivers of story that meander, pool, cascade, whirl, eddy and plumet over the landscape in which we go about our everyday busy-ness. The world flows, we flow and language flows, just as birds being birds, soar upon invisible currents of air.
Juliette:
Yes, English grammar is easier to learn, because it doesn't have the problem of genders, which makes using adjectives and verb conjugation a lot simpler.
But English actually has more vocabulary. If you have an abundance of words you can be more precise and efficient and end up needing less words to precisely say what you mean.
That, and the fact that English speaking countries pretty much colonized the whole world and dominated trade for centuries, is probably the reason why English has become the dominant language, not necessarily because it's easier.
Marc:
Great depiction of the different 'foci' that make languages so distinct from each other. On one point we agree: language comes naturally to humans. Birds are made to fly, we are made to speak.
A great post, and an excellent exchange, you all.
My two bits’ worth:
1. Madeleine raises incredibly important issues which have long been researched (and sometimes settled) by scientists: For example, it was Mendel who once and for all disproved the theories of the Frenchman Lamarck and Soviet geneticist Lysenko, who both believed that acquired characteristics could be inherited. Of course, they cannot. But Marxism had a vested interest in assuming that they could, because Marxism desperately believes in man’s improvability through socialization.
2. Another milestone is the Sapir-Whorf “hypothesis” (two anthropologists), which essentially says that language determines perception, thought, and therefore behavior. I firmly believe that this is no longer a “hypothesis,” but a proven scientific fact.
Madeleine and Marc give excellent examples (Marc’s eloquence never fails). The Arctic Inuits’ rich vocabulary when dealing with snow and ice, Navaho language, etc.
Another example is Arabic, when dealing with camels and desert culture, and conversely the absence of a word denoting a camel in Iniut, etc.
3. Chomsky’s position is murky. While he is also a “linguistic relativist,” like Sapir and Whorf, he posits an innate human brain structure which makes language possible, so he is also a biological reductionist.
4. Juliette, all excellent points, too, except for one small error: It’s the Germans who pretty much have a corner on Romanticism. France’s hallmark is the opposite -Rationalism. France is the country of Descartes, the decimal system, everything divided into three (E.g. Liberte. Egalite et Fraternite).
It’s German Romanticism which eventually ran amok - from Nietzsche and Wagner to Hitler.
October 5, 2011 2:03 PM
Tom:
Actually, Chomsky might be right, after all. New studies show that language is a built-in ‘instinct’ and that, if language didn’t exist, humans would invent it. The ‘forbidden experiment’ is not an option (isolating an infant from birth to see if it would develop language), but they have done experiments with birds: over the course of four or five generations, song-less birds eventually acquire song on their own.
A few reasons why the ability to speak would be innate:
1) Why are we the only species that talks? If language is learnt, how come we cannot teach chimpanzees to talk? It is not a question of difference in anatomy.
2) Language is incredibly complex, yet we all learn how to talk so easily? The human brain must be primed for speaking, just like we are primed to walk.
The Whorf hypothesis, that language partially shapes thinking. Actually it isn’t all that clear. If there is no word for ‘blue’ in a language, it doesn’t mean that the ‘blue’ itself doesn’t exist. Certain cultures have more words for one concept, where other cultures have none. But this falls in the realm of ‘jargon’. Software engineers have a whole vocabulary that the rest of us never even heard of.
Of one thing I am sure: language is good at clearing the cobwebs of one's mind. It’s the super-cleaning lady. As I write, it reminds me of taking the time to unravel a ball of knotted up yarn. How else am I going to express anything intelligently?
Hi Madeleine,
The reason I dont like Chomsky is that he is/was at Harvard (joke).
I am reminded of a cute story:
Back some centuries ago, a German King ordered his court "scientists" to conduct an experiment: Lock up a bunch of newborn babies in a room. After a while, find out in which language they communicate. The experiment would surely prove that they use German, which will have sprung up naturally, since it is THE natural language.
Meanwhile, across the Rhine, a French King conducted the same experiment to prove that French is the natural language.
In response to Tom's first comment:
Of course acquired characteristics can and are being inherited. You, yourself, Tom are a product of it. If your grandparents had been peasants instead of intellectuals, where would you be today? You are who you are from your predecessors' learned (aquired) characteristics. Without acquired characteristics there would be no evolution.
Who Is More Romantic?
I lived in Paris and Berlin for many years. Who are more romantic, the French or the Germans? Having a choice between Paris and Berlin, where would a just-married couple chose to go for their honeymoon? Is Edith Piaff not more romantic than Wagner?
An acquired characteristic is a nonhereditary change of function or structure in a plant or animal made in response to the environment.
Acquired characteristics include bodily changes brought about by disease or by repeated use or disuse of a body part (as in the building or atrophy of muscle tissue).
The heritability of acquired characteristics was rejected by Charles Darwin in his formulation of the theory of evolution.
Great to see Tom mention Whorf and Sapir. Long misunderstood, their model is gaining renewed interest. (I assume Tom caught my Hopi reference)
Does the color blue exist in the absence of its linguistic representation? It certainly does not exist in knowing and many studies indicate that it is also not available to raw perception as well.
We do not know or even sense most of what the world presents to us. If we did, we would be hopelessly deluged by that input, paralyzed by raw sensation. (Of course the very idea of "raw" sensation is nonsense itself.)
The same is true for unknowing creatures who are by definition, genetically endowed with senses which are themselves programed to selectively sense the world.
I always loved Kliban's cartoon of at cat intently staring at a blank corner on a room, attuned to some sensory input that is not available to us. The cat does not see more than us, he sees what is relevant to his cat being. Meanwhile, we watch electronic representations of ourselves on the tele.
Whorf and Sapir where derided for linguistic determinism but language is never a one way street. Active experience gives rise to language and language gives rise to active experience. The two are entwined in a dialectic driven by purposeful behavior.
Chomsky of course, is an idiot. He tries to reduce language behavior to some core elements, in effect deconstructing the whole edifice that gives rise to language into disembodied parts. A rib-eye stake is part of a cow but studying steaks will not lead us to understand a cow. As any grade schooler knows, studying cows is a better approach.
Our mindedness, based in language behavior, is a happy or sad accident, depending on your mood at any given moments. It is not a pre-programmed faculty governed by structures and rules of action but a process that emerges in social behavior.
Will socially isolated babies spontaneously create language? Nonsenese! They will simply die. The chicken and egg problem is a fool's errand.
Consider a termite as an example. If I take a termite larva and nurture it, will the single termite proceed to build a complex nest? It will not because in the absence of a community of fellow termites, it cannot.
The genetic programming inside a single termite cannot even be interpreted. It only works in the context of a community of termites behaving in relation to one another.
Our language behavior is the same as the termites nest building behavior. It only works in the context of a community of linguistic nest builders, an accidental partt that arose on the African savannas among a group of apes who spend eons hanging out together grunting, groaning and chattering their way to consciousness.
RE Acquired Characteristics
If you want to make sense of natural selection you need to understand that what is "selected for" is behavior and not structure. It is not the wings on birds that are perpetuated over generations. Flight behavior is perpetuated in some worldly context, wings being only one structural characteristic of the whole creature that comes to make its living in flight.
Structures enable behavior but it is the behavior in relation to the world that either "works" or does not "work".
Behavior rules and amongst humans, language behavior rules, for better or worse.
Hi folks,
A lot of stuff here (again).
Juliette, you mis-understood the word "inherited." It means "genetically inherited." And it is a proven scientific fact that acquired characteristics cannot be genetically transmitted. Only mutations can (Let's re-check Darwin, Mendel and everyone else who knows a lot about this).
Regarding romanticism, the difference between us on this issue could also be attributed to semantics (I'm trying to be nice). I suppose you don't find Wagner romantic,in the sense that you dont find his music beautiful. But - depending on the definition of romanticism - he is often considered the epitome of romanticism.
Marc,
of course, my anecdote about feral babies was a joke. You and I - both Meadians, right? - know that language can only arise through the social process. Kingsley Davis' studies of feral children demonstrates this.
And speaking of Mead (and Darwin):
You rightly paraphrase them. They
are the ones who first taught us that "function precedes structure," and not the other way around. In other words, birds do not fly because they have wings, but they have/develop wings because they fly. As you say, behavior/process precedes structure. This great discovery is the beauty of Darwin in Biology and George Herbert Mead in Sociology.
Chomsky an idiot? You said it, not I. You are brave.
Finally, does blue exist if there is no word for it? ha ha. Does the falling tree make a noise if no one hears it?
anonymous,
Thanks, you said it better than I.
Marc:
Knowing and perceiving are two different things: the color blue can be perceived but not known by name. I suspect Homer knew that the sea was blue, but called it black because there was no word for blue in his vocabulary.
I tend to think that language’s primary function is not to create reality but to represent it. I envy the way you dismiss an entire body of science by calling Chomsky an ‘idiot’. I have to confess that I didn’t read his books (they are just too difficult), but I did read quite a bit by Steven Pinker. I highly recommend his latest book: ‘The Blank Slate’. Chomsky has tried to make sense of language by reducing it to its core elements. How else would you analyze something so structured and so complex that it boggles the mind? Isn't that the hallmark of a true scientist?
I am inclined to believe that humans’ ability to speak is innate. It is not a happy accident. It has evolved, just like our ability to walk. There are some humans who walk on all fours, but it is rare, even when they are raised by wolves or monkeys.
There are certain pre-conditions for learning how to speak, one of which is exposure to a group. But if humans didn’t have a ‘pre-disposition’, if speaking wasn’t in their nature, no matter how much nurture they get, they would never learn it and forever remain at the level of chimpanzees.
Madeleine,
The idea that language represents reality rather than creates it is a quaint Victorian one. Our sensory faculties do not record "data" about the world. Sensory organs are quite specialized and vary from creature to creature in accordance with the behaviors that have emerged as characteristic of various organisms.
Instruments we have developed have enabled us to discern that the radiation spectrum ranges beyond our innate sensitivities. Far and away we insensate to most of our environment and even using our best instruments we are at best able to sense only within an extremely narrow bandwidth.
Comparatively we acknowledge that bats and cetaceans appear to make use of sound for navigating their environment, but in all likelihood, this is only the tip of their experiential iceberg. We cannot know what it is like to be a bat or a dolphin. Our anthropomorphism runs deeper than we can
imagine. Our habit of knowing blinds us infinite variety and renders randomness completely invisible.
So "blue" is a vaguely definable, continually varying pattern that we experience as symbolically bounded idea we define as "blue". What is "blue" or blue to other creatures?
We might wisely rule out "blue" but to answer the question does blue exist for them, we must resort to observing whether or not they interact with blue behaviorally. Do dolphins sense blue? Do fish sense wet? Are jellyfish into Chrysaora porno?
Neoplatonism is alive and well in much of the scientific community---tragically so. Ideal forms do not exist outside our active relation with the world we sense. Our senses are limited and attuned. Once a layer of symbolic meaning is added, we are deep in it.
In other words, our senses are not simple recorders that feed our minds data. They are themselves part of our minded experience. In the case of humans, believing (knowing) really is seeing. Sans imaginative narrative, other creatures live in more narrowly defined bands of experience in which "blue" and blue exist do not exist for most.
I have read Chomsky and Pinker. Both are "smart" but both have almost everything turned upside down. The have consumed the kool Aid of Neoplatonic reductionism. This is not a surprise because the entire edifice of Newtonian science has been built on that foundation.
Are humans innately predisposed to language and so equipped? Of course, just as birds are predisposed to flight and so equipped. No argument there.
In thinking about natural selection, I often imagine that each creature emerges in form and function to behaviorally exploit transitory patterns in its environment. The wavelengths that produce blue to some sensory organs might be such a pattern and for humans "blue" as well.
But in behavior (experience) every creature is tunneling through the world. Its experience is bounded by the walls of its tunnels. We nor any other organism has access to the full breadth of a "true" world. The only access we or they have to the world is in our and their active RELATION to that world.
Heisenberg put it this way: We do not see the world as it is but rather, we see world exposed by our method of questioning. (Our method for making our way in that world.)
Read Alva Noe's book "We are not our brains". Easy and short. He does a pretty good job of pulling back the curtain.
Our senses, I am sure, do not record everything out there, and since language is built on those imperfect senses, it will not exactly represent reality.
All I am trying to say is that language, in and of itself, is probably innate, not just learnt. I think we agree at least on that.
No linguistic interaction, no language. No language, no mind.
“Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in, and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen? I was like that ship before my education began, only I was without compass or sounding-line, and had no way of knowing how near the harbour was. “Light! give me light!” was the wordless cry of my soul, and the light of love shone on me in that very hour.”
Read an excerpt from Hellen Keller's awakening here:
http://www.3sigma.com/awakening/
http://www.mendosa.com/snow.html
Interesting read about the misconception that Inuits have more words for the color snow (followed by a funny list of words for snow).
I think that language DOES influence how we think and who we are.
Kimber Hawkey
From what I understand, the many so-called words for 'snow'in Inuit are additions of suffixes to the basic word for 'snowflake' (qani). As a fictitious example:
If 'qani' is snow, 'aqani' could be snowlike, 'baqani' could mean 'lots of snowlife stuff', 'abaqani' could be 'gathering lots of snowlike stuff', 'Iabaqani' could be 'I gather lots of snowlike stuff', 'youabaqani' could be 'you gather lots of snofwlike stuff', etc.
So these are not really separate words. I think that is where the confusion lies.
The fact that one language uses more suffixes than another might influences the way the speaker thinks as opposed to a speaker of a language with less suffixes. That IS possible..
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