Friday 1 August 2003

Pic of the day: Languages may differ, but the underlying meaning is the same. (Screenshot from The Sims.) Common business oriented language, anyone? ^^

Language and thought

I used to be firmly in the camp that believed that language forms our thoughts. It seems obvious, because there are things I can think in English that don't make sense in Norwegian, and the other way around. Also there is research that shows that bilingual people emphasize different values when using different languages. (The article I read long ago was about Latinos in the USA, but I can remember the same happening with Norwegian Book Language when I was a kid living in a New Norwegian area. We kids used Book Language for dramatic situations, to express unlikely events or characters.)

But lately I have concluded that there are limits. I know, you get these enthusiastic linguists who point out that in some Native American dialect rivers are verbs; that in Chinese, the future grows upward rather than move forward; that in some remote tribal language there are no personal pronouns for individuals as opposed to the group. And so on and so forth. I am sure these traits can be mind-expanding and all, and safer than drugs. But hear me out.

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In Finnish, a language very different from most European languages but located in our own Nordic culture, there are no grammatical genders. There are no separate forms for male and female nouns, and no gender- dependent pronouns at all. "He" and "she" are the same word ("hän"). Despite this, the Finns reproduce quite normally, and they don't seem to have more homosexuality than other Nordic countries. Women did get the right to vote slightly earlier, but Norway was not too long after, and we have more nature-realistic grammatical genders than most.

In English, the same pronoun is used when speaking to one person or a group, but not when speaking on behalf of one person vs a group. This certainly seems strange to those of us who grew up with different pronouns, but it does not seem to warp the sense of identity beyond recognition. There may be the occasional misunderstanding, but no profound loss of meaning.

In Japanese, there is a fairly limited number of syllables in common use, and a piece of speech can mean very different things depending on context. Very different. (I understand that Chinese is even more so, but I only watch Japanese dialog on a daily basis, so I will limit myself to that.) Basically, if you walk in on a dialog in Japanese, you could jump to very wrong conclusions. Even more so than in English, I believe. But in practice, the Japanese find ways to guide the conversation such that everyone is hanging on, unless they specifically want to be cryptic. You could say that their language is living on the edge of puns. Then again, to a Norwegian the same seems to be true about English, which verbs nouns and nouns verbs. ("Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.")

Would you believe that I was moved to write this entry by the following statement from Scary Go Round: "Unfortunate yogurt pot lid / petri dish licking confusion incident." Despite the absence of grammar as we know it, it makes perfect sense in context. I am tempted to write a story in which aliens speak like that all the time. Right-brain speech.

Yes, according to what articles I have read on the topic, it seems to be a small part of the left brain hemisphere that imposes grammar on our language. Take it out, and you can still make poetry, but you can no longer make sense. And it is the same areas in all people, except that in a majority of women there is a secondary speech area on the right side. I think there is something deep to be said about that, but I am not the one to say it ...

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Anyway, in conclusion: I still believe that language subtly shapes our thoughts and perceptions. But the key word here is "subtly". Language cannot override basic concepts that are "hard-wired" into our brains, such as past and future, I and you, man and woman, truth and falsehood. Even if a language does not fully support a basic concept, the human mind will somehow find a way to grasp it. The details differ, but the human mind is by and large the same, everywhere and at all times. We are not a blank sheet - there may be nothing written on it, but there are lines to write on.