In my childhood before fourth or fifth grade, I was a reading fiend. I don’t know by what impulse this attraction grew, but I read like it was an addiction. It didn’t matter if it was even remotely entertaining. I read the same My Little Tree House book every day before breakfast, I read the sanitary guideline posters in public restrooms, and I read how-to instructions for IKEA furniture.
I stopped reading sometime in middle school, and I do think I am a bit dumber because of it. Reading gives you an arsenal of stupendously cosmopolitan terminology. Aka big words. And with a large vocabulary, you can have big thoughts.
A river of running water is not the same river if it trickles, not runs. Or perhaps it gushes and cascades, not gurgles and babbles. But if the only word I know to describe that river is running, it’s the same any way it flows. And is a river the same as an ocean if my vocabulary doesn’t specify a word for a skinny and long body of water? After all, to me, all the trees in a forest are trees but to a botanist, they are American sycamores, sugar maples, and red oaks. Our vocabulary shapes the way we see and distinguish things, and how we think.
As a smart man named Confucius said, “The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name.” There is power in naming. Giving a name to a thing gives it an identity in those syllables that influences our understanding of the world.
You would think, for example, that color is objective and, of course, the sky is blue. But how much of our perception begins with language? Some languages like Ancient Greek don’t even have a word for blue. In The Odyssey Homer describes the sea as “wine-dark.” Compare this with the Japanese language, which has a specific word to describe the hue of the sky: mizuiro. The same way that pink and red are unique in English (not just dark and light red), the hue of the sky is a separate, distinct color from blue. Just as English describes a bouquet of roses and tulips as red and pink, Japanese describes a horizon where the sky meets the sea as mizuiro and ao (blue). So the Ancient Greeks had no word for blue and the Japanese have two. The Ancient Greeks were not colorblind, and the Japanese are not visually advanced. But their languages, the words they have that describe and name color, expose the way they experience color. By giving a name to a color, it gives it a persona, an identity separate from the rest of the color wheel.
But what does the world look like if you have no words at all for color? Our language shapes our realities but to what extent does it govern our thoughts? You can ask that question to Jill Bolte Taylor, a woman who woke up one day without the left hemisphere of her brain when a ruptured blood vessel caused a stroke. The left hemisphere is the logical brain; it understands and is responsible for language. You might pity her for her experience, but she will tell you that having no words was serene, almost enjoyable.
Upon rehabilitation, Taylor confessed that she was nostalgic for that state of mind. She describes it as a “la la land,” the ultimate dream of a mindfulness guru. Taylor floated purely in the present because even if she wanted to, she could not think about time. Without words, her brain was silent. That little voice in her head was shut up. In her wordless world, she had no understanding of where she ended. There in her hospital bed, the blanket and her body and the tiled floor were one.
Research shows that our vocabulary is unmistakably tied to our thoughts. Science witnessed, for the first time, the birth of a new language when a school for the deaf was created in Nicaragua and with it the connection between thought and language. Before the 1970s, there was no deaf education in Nicaragua. Deaf individuals were isolated, stunting the development of their own language.
At the school, about sixty deaf children, ages four to sixteen, learned that there were others just like them, others without language too. The birth of Nicaraguan Sign Language was on the playground where the children played together. Its evolution probably started with words like ball and then pass the ball and then boys have cooties and so on. Though a language’s journey from initial vocabulary to grammar and syntax is intriguing, it is beside the point. These kids are evidence that, to an extent, our language capacitates our thoughts.
When linguists got word of this spontaneous development of language, they studied the kids. In one experiment, two groups of students were divided by age, a younger and older generation. The students viewed a scenario: two children playing with a toy train. One child puts the train in the toy box and leaves the room; the other child moves the toy from the box to underneath a pillow while the other child is absent. Subjects were then asked where they thought the first child would look first for the train when they returned to the room.
The younger generations fared better in empathizing and understanding the perspectives of other individuals. They answered the toy box, of course. But the older generation of deaf individuals performed at the cognitive level of an infant. A majority answered that the child would first look underneath the pillow. Why? As NSL evolved over the years, the younger generation of deaf kids had streamlined the older generation’s signs and expanded their vocabulary. When the older generation described a story, they mimed the actions with their bodies. But the younger generation learned to express emotions and thought through signs symbolizing ideas.
The original vocabulary’s sole sign for thinking was pointing to your brain. But the younger generation had created words for something that I know that you don’t and for something that I don’t know that you do. The mere existence of these words forged a neural pathway in their brains, unlocking the understanding that other individuals think just like us and thus enabling the younger generation to see the story from the character’s perspectives.
This example naturally precedes the question, can we think things we don’t have words for? The Ancient Greeks saw the color blue without a word for it, but the lack of language inhibited deaf Nicaraguans from thinking about thoughts. Perhaps there is a difference here; color is a much more tangible, physical reality than our abstract thoughts. Perhaps it’s true that color can exist to us without words, yet we need language to comprehend the invisibility of thought.
The influence of language is undeniable. We can see it in comparing linguistic differences. Nouns in most Romance languages are gendered. In Spanish a chair is feminine, but in English it has no gender. English useS past/present/future tenses to describe time; Mandarin doesn’t. The German sentence structure places the verb at the end, while in English the verb is often nearer the beginning. Surely these technical differences influence our perceptions; they dictate what we think, how we see gender and time, whether the subject or verb is prioritized, etc. Studying these facets of language will ultimately illustrate the way language shapes the way we think about, and thus experience, the world.
I would like to believe that thinking without words is like trying to imagine that the universe is infinitely expanding. It’s impossibly elusive. Maybe we just don’t have a word for the infinite growth of space yet, and when we do it will get a little easier to comprehend.
Sources
“English Doesn't Have a Word for This Color, but Japanese Does.” Mental Floss, 6 Apr. 2017,
www.mentalfloss.com/article/94054/english-doesnt-have-word-color-japanese-does.
Ivanova, Anna. “Can We Think without Language?” MIT McGovern Institute, 21 Oct. 2019,
mcgovern.mit.edu/2019/05/02/ask-the-brain-can-we-think-without-language/.
Parks, Shoshi. “How Deaf Children in Nicaragua Created a New Language.” Atlas Obscura, Atlas Obscura, 13 July 2018,
www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-nicaraguan-sign-language.
Popova, Maria. “How Naming Confers Dignity Upon Life and Gives Meaning to Existence.” Brain Pickings, 27 Feb. 2016,
www.brainpickings.org/2015/07/23/robin-wall-kimmerer-gathering-moss-naming/.
“Words: Radiolab.” WNYC Studios, 9 Aug. 2010,
www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/episodes/91725-words.