How are language and thought related?
14 July 2005
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A surprising number of the things people say about thinking are actually expressed as claims about language:
- "We didn't even speak the same language" really means our thoughts were totally different, and
- "I was speechless" nearly always means I was astonished, not that my voice stopped working.
Clearly, language and thought are closely related. Language permits thoughts to be represented in our minds, helping us reason, plan, remember, and communicate. It's communication that gets all the press when we talk about language, but there are also questions to be asked about whether the language we use causes us to think in a certain way.
Different languages put things differently. But does that mean some thoughts can only be expressed in one language? Is it possible to have thoughts in one language that can't be translated into another?
Well, it's pretty easy to find words in one language that don't have exact equivalents in another. The German word Schadenfreude is a famous example: it refers to the malicious pleasure some people find in other people's misfortunes. But does the lack of a one-word English equivalent mean that English speakers aren't able to experience that feeling themselves or recognize it in others? Surely not.
Another familiar example concerns color: some languages have far fewer words than English for naming primary colors. Quite a few use the same word for both "green" and "blue". Some have only four, or three, or two color-name words. Does this mean their speakers can't physically distinguish multiple colors? It seems not. An experiment in the 1960s found that members of a New Guinea tribe whose language named only two colors were just as good at matching a full spectrum of color chips as English speakers.
And let's not forget the tired old claim that Eskimos see the world differently because they have some huge number of words for different varieties of snow. You may be disappointed to learn that there's hardly any truth to it. The eight languages of the Eskimo family have only a modest number of snow terms. Four were mentioned in a 1911 description of a Canadian Eskimo language by the great anthropologist Franz Boas: a general word for snow lying on the ground; a word for 'snowflake'; one for 'blizzard'; one for 'drift'; and that was it. His point had to do not with numbers of words or their influence on thinking, but just with the way different languages draw different distinctions when naming things.
But after years of exaggeration and embellishment of his remarks, a seductive myth has arisen. People with no knowledge of Eskimo languages repeat it over and over in magazines, newspapers and lectures, with the number of alleged "Eskimo words for snow" varying wildly from the dozens to the thousands. They offer no evidence, and they ignore the fact that English, too, has plenty of words for snow – words like "slush", "sleet", "avalanche", "blizzard", and "flurry", but they insist that these arctic nomads see a whole different world.
So, do the vocabularies of Eskimo languages really give Inuit and Yup'ik people a unique way of perceiving, unshared by English speakers? It's extremely unlikely.
People tend to make overstatements about language shaping thought. Some go as far as claiming that your language creates your world. But the idea that our language determines how we think is pure speculation. And it's hard to imagine what could possibly support it. In order to know there was a thought that was understandable for a speaker of, let's say, Hindi, but not for us English speakers, we'd need to have that Hindi thought explained to us. But that would mean we could understand it after all.
Our worldview may be influenced in some ways by our native language; but that doesn't mean there are untranslatable thoughts that only a speaker of some other language can have.
That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes from Dr. Geoffrey Pullum, Professor of Linguistics and Humanities at the University of California, Santa Cruz. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. Visit us at www.cofc.edu/linguist. And keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.
Comments
Delightful!
I came while in pursuit of words from one language which have no equivalent in other languages. However, I'm not specifically interested in the words per se. Rather, I'm interested in the issue of variations in societal ken. Since words are used to express intellectual concepts, what may we learn about the ambient wisdom of cultures from the armentarium of philosophical words they possess? Clearly, schadenfreude, as above, is on topic. And, as you reference, the issues are complex since the concept behind schadenfreude may be expressed in English, as you have defined. However, is it correct to say that Germans have a more profound understanding of the schadenfreude concept: revealed in the observation that they have promulgated a word for it?
On a different level, I'm one of the people who has blandly propagated the erroneous Eskimo story. But, I will not further!
Finally, as a neurologist, I can report that in the workings of the human mind clearly concepts precede vocabulary (which I think you would consider obvious), and also that concepts have a life which continues beyond vocabulary. So, for example, when people have a stroke producing dysphasia (a less serious form of aphasia, where some expressive verbal ability is retained) they have persistent frustration with the inability to speak words to represent their conceptualizations.
Neurology and neurological disease, by the way, provides many insights into fragmentary interrelationship between intellectualization and linguistic expression.
Thanks again.
Posted by: John Barbuto at February 14, 2006 09:28 AM
Here's another thought. I have a concept for which I have never been able to find an English word. Further, when the concept was placed before the readership of AWAD (A Word A Day) no reader there was able to help me find a word that I had over-looked. Yet, the concept is--in my opinion--important. It is a concept which can reveal insight into our philosophical sophistication. So, here is the concept. What word expresses the notion that a choice can be correct when it is made, and later incorrect when time has provided more data? For example, imagine a horse race wherein four horses have never won a race and a fifth has won every race it was in. Imagine further that you are to bet on this race. Imagine further that you will be paid the same winnings for your bet, regardless of which horse you bet on. So, which horse would you bet on? Of course, you would bet on the horse which always wins. This is obviously the "right" bet. Now, further imagine that the race is run and one of the other horses actually wins. After the ouctome is known your bet can be said to be "wrong". Before the outcome is known your choice was "right" and after it is "wrong". What word reflects such a choice? While this example is highly polarized and simplified, the conceptual framework is a routine, real-world problem. In healthcare, for instance, doctors and patients routinely make choices which, at the time, seem the right choice, while later information reveals them to be the "wrong" choice. Yet, the choice, when it was made, was not really wrong. And, to put a point on it, lawyers are wont to criticize "wrong" choices from the safety of a "post hoc" vantagepoint. This is very much a real-world issue. So, is there a word for such choices? I've never found one. I don't think the English language has sufficient sophistication to recognize this dilemma, as manifest by its philosophical lexicon. However, as an aside, perhaps another culture has greater insight, and the vocabulary to prove it. Any thoughts?
Posted by: John Barbuto at February 14, 2006 09:48 AM