From the Introduction
"There are four
tongues worthy of the world’s use", says the Talmud: “Greek for song,
Latin for war, Syriac for lamentation, and Hebrew for ordinary speech.”
Other authorities have been no less decided in their judgement on what
different languages are good for. The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, King
of Spain, Archduke of Austria, and master of several European tongues,
professed to speaking “Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men,
and German to my horse.” A nation’s language, so we are often told,
reflects its culture, psyche and modes of thought. Peoples in tropical
climes are so laid-back it’s no wonder they let most of their consonants
fall by the wayside. And one only needs to compare the mellow sounds of
Portuguese with the harshness of Spanish to understand the
quintessential difference between these two neighbouring cultures. The
grammar of some languages is simply not logical enough to express
complex ideas. German, on the other hand, is an ideal vehicle for
formulating the most precise philosophical profundities, as it is a
particularly orderly language, which is why the Germans have such an
orderly mind. (But can one not hear the goose-step in its gauche
humorless sounds?) Some languages don’t even have a future tense, so
their speakers naturally have no grasp of the future. The Babylonians
would have been hard pressed to understand Crime and Punishment, because
their language used one and the same word to describe both of these
concepts. The craggy fjords are audible in the precipitous intonation of
Norwegian, and you can hear the dark l’s of Russian in Tchaikovsky’s
lugubrious tunes. French is not only a Romance language, but the
language of romance, par excellence. English is an adaptable, even
promiscuous language, and Italian – ah, Italian!
Many a
dinner-table conversation is embellished by such vignettes, for few
subjects lend themselves more readily to disquisition than the character
of different languages and their speakers. And yet, should these lofty
observations be carried away from the conviviality of the dining-room to
the chill of the study, they would quickly collapse like a soufflé of
airy anecdote – at best amusing and meaningless, at worst bigoted and
absurd. Most foreigners cannot hear the difference between rugged
Norwegian and the endless plains of Swedish. The industrious protestant
Danes have dropped more consonants onto their icy windswept soil than
any indolent tropical tribe. And if Germans do have a systematic mind,
this is just as likely to be because their exceedingly erratic
mother-tongue has exhausted their brain’s capacity to cope with any
further irregularity. English speakers can hold lengthy conversations
about forthcoming events wholly in the present tense (I’m flying to
Vancouver next week…) without any detectable loosening in their grip on
the concepts of futurity. No language – not even that of the most
‘primitive’ tribes – is inherently unsuitable for expressing the most
complex ideas. Any shortcomings in a language’s ability to philosophize
simply boil down to the lack of some specialized abstract vocabulary and
perhaps a few syntactic constructions, but these can easily be
borrowed, just as all European languages pinched their verbal
philosophical toolkit from Latin, which in turn lifted it wholesale from
Greek. If speakers of any tribal tongue were so minded, they could
easily do the same today, and it would be eminently possible to
deliberate in Zulu about the respective merits of empiricism and
rationalism, or hold forth about existentialist phenomenology in
West-Greenlandic.
.... Once one has sifted out the unfounded
and the uninformed, the farcical and the fantastic, is there anything
sensible left to say about the relation between language, culture and
thought? Does language reflect the culture of a society in any profound
sense, beyond such trivia as the number of words it has for snow or for
shearing camels? And even more contentiously, can different languages
lead their speakers to different thoughts and perceptions?
For the majority of serious scholars today, the answer to all these
questions is a resounding ‘no’. The dominant view among linguists today
is that language is primarily an instinct, in other words, that the
fundaments of language are coded in our genes and are the same across
the human race. Noam Chomsky has famously argued that a Martian
scientist would conclude that all earthlings speak dialects of the same
language. Deep down, so runs the theory, all languages share the same
Universal Grammar, the same underlying concepts, the same degree of
systemic complexity. The only important aspects of language, therefore,
or at least the only ones worth investigating, are those that reveal
language as an expression of innate human nature. Finally, there is
nowadays a broad consensus that if our mother-tongue influences the way
we think at all, any such influence is negligible, even trivial – and
that fundamentally we all think in the same way.
In the
pages to follow, however, I will try to convince you, probably against
your initial intuition, and certainly against the fashionable academic
view of today, that the answer to the questions above is – yes. In this
plaidoyer for culture, I will argue that cultural differences are
reflected in language in profound ways, and that a growing body of
reliable scientific research now provides solid evidence that our
mother-tongue can affect the way we think and perceive the world. But
just before you relegate this book to the crack-pot shelf, next to last
year’s fad-diet recipes and the How to Bond with your Goldfish manual, I
give you my solemn pledge that we will not indulge in groundless
twaddle of any kind. We shall not soar to such lofty questions as which
languages have more ‘esprit’, nor shall we delve into the mysteries of
which cultures are more ‘profound’. The problems that will occupy us in
this book are of a very different kind.
In fact, the
areas of culture we shall be concerned with belong to the most
down-to-earth level of everyday life, and the aspects of language we
shall encounter are on the most down-to-earth level of everyday speech.
For it turns out that the most significant connections between language,
culture and thought are to be found where they are least expected, in
those places where healthy common sense would suggest that all cultures
and all languages should be exactly the same...
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