The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language Read online

  And what an elephant is, it is one of the animals. And what the elephant does, it lives in the jungle. I can also live in the zoo. And what it has, it has long, gray ears, fan ears, ears that can blow in the wind. It has a long trunk that can pick up grass or pick up hay…If they’re in a bad mood, it can be terrible…If the elephant gets mad, it could stomp; it could charge. Sometimes elephants can charge, like a bull can charge. They have big, long, tusks. They can damage a car…It could be dangerous. When they’re in a pinch, when they’re in a bad mood, it can be terrible. You don’t want an elephant as a pet. You want a cat or a dog or a bird.

  This is a story about chocolates. Once upon a time, in Chocolate World there used to be a Chocolate Princess. She was such a yummy princess. She was on her chocolate throne and then some chocolate man came to see her. And the man bowed to her and he said these words to her. The man said to her, “Please, Princess Chocolate. I want you to see how I do my work. And it’s hot outside in Chocolate World, and you might melt to the ground like melted butter. And if the sun changes to a different color, then the Chocolate World—and you—won’t melt. You can be saved if the sun changes to a different color. And if it doesn’t change to a different color, you and Chocolate World are doomed.

  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.

  Mentalese

  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.

  The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc [English Socialism], but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought—that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc—should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever. To give a single example. The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as “This dog is free from lice” or “This field is free from weeds.” It could not be used in its old sense of “politically free” or “intellectually free,” since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless.

  …A person growing up with Newspeak as his sole language would no more know that equal had once had the secondary meaning of “politically equal,” or that free had once meant “intellectually free,” than, for instance, a person who had never heard of chess would be aware of the secondary meanings attaching to queen and rook. There would be many crimes and errors which it would be beyond his power to commit, simply because they were nameless and therefore unimaginable.

  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 John1972 and John1994, 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:

  This parrot is no more. It has ceased to be. It’s expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late parrot. It’s a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If you hadn’t nailed it to the perch, it would be pushing up the daisies. It’s rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-parrot.

  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:

  We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way—an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees.

  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?

  As soon as Whorf’s articles appeared, the psycholinguists Eric Lenneberg and Roger Brown pointed out two non sequiturs in his argument. First, Whorf did not actually study any Apaches; it is not clear that he ever met one. His assertions about Apache psychology are based entirely on Apache grammar—making his argument circular. Apaches speak differently, so they must think differently. How do we know that they think differently? Just listen to the way they speak!

  Second, Whorf rendered the sentences as clumsy, word-for-word translations, designed to make the literal meanings seem as odd as possible. But looking at the actual glosses that Whorf provided, I could, with equal grammatical justification, render the first sentence as the mundane “Clear stuff—water—is falling.” Turni
ng the tables, I could take the English sentence “He walks” and render it “As solitary masculinity, leggedness proceeds.” Brown illustrates how strange the German mind must be, according to Whorf’s logic, by reproducing Mark Twain’s own translation of a speech he delivered in flawless German to the Vienna Press Club:

  I am indeed the truest friend of the German language—and not only now, but from long since—yes, before twenty years already…. I would only some changes effect. I would only the language method—the luxurious, elaborate construction compress, the eternal parenthesis suppress, do away with, annihilate; the introduction of more than thirteen subjects in one sentence forbid; the verb so far to the front pull that one it without a telescope discover can. With one word, my gentlemen, I would your beloved language simplify so that, my gentlemen, when you her for prayer need, One her yonder-up understands.

  …I might gladly the separable verb also a little bit reform. I might none do let what Schiller did: he has the whole history of the Thirty Years’ War between the two members of a separate verb inpushed. That has even Germany itself aroused, and one has Schiller the permission refused the History of the Hundred Years’ War to compose—God be it thanked! After all these reforms established be will, will the German language the noblest and the prettiest on the world be.