In his book The Second World War, Winston Churchill suggested that one reason for Japan’s disastrous defeat at the Battle of Midway was the cumbersome nature of the Japanese language.
This wasn’t among Churchill’s wiser pronouncements, yet the idea underlying it is widely held — that the language we speak shapes the way we see the world. It’s a seductive and influential view. In this succinct, accessible and engaging book, McWhorter looks at the evidence and concludes that this popular idea is wrong. His argument is convincing and, despite its brevity, the book covers immense ground. Anyone fascinated by language would enjoy and learn from it.
The notion that the way we use language determines the way we understand the world has (as McWhorter puts it) sexiness. You find it in unexpected places. Daniel Hannan, the Conservative eurosceptic, recently argued from his experience as a European MEP that “there are intrinsic properties in English that favour the expression of empirical, down-to-earth, practical ideas”. He gave no evidence for this assertion, evidently believing that none was necessary.
Scholars of language have a name for this idea. It’s called Whorfianism, after the American linguist Benjamin Whorf. It’s encapsulated in words written by Whorf in 1939: “We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages.”
What does this mean, exactly? Here’s an example given by McWhorter. Russian has a word for light blue and one for dark blue. There is, however, no word for blue. In Russian, says McWhorter, “the sky and a blueberry are different colours”. Does this make a difference to the way that Russian speakers perceive the colour blue?
Actually, it does. Psychological tests showed that Russian speakers were able to identify a very slightly differing shade of blue more quickly than English speakers. The difference in response time, however, amounted to less than one-tenth of a second.
It is on this smidgen of truth, argues McWhorter, that a grand and mistaken theory has been erected. Yes, there is a link between culture and language. McWhorter is critical of the idea, associated with the famed linguist Noam Chomsky, of a “universal grammar” that all languages share. Languages differ. There are some that have no regular verbs (Navajo) and some that have scores, even hundreds, of genders (Nasioi, in Papua New Guinea). That does not mean, however, that language shapes thought all by itself.
Some 20 years ago, in a chapter in his influential book The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker demolished the Whorfian argument from the standpoint of cognitive science. McWhorter advances a similar case, at greater length, from the standpoint of linguistics. His targets include recent popular books such as Guy Deutscher’s Through the Language Glass (whose argument is nicely stated by its subtitle, “Why the world looks different in other languages”).
McWhorter demonstrates how paltry is the evidence supporting the notion that languages are like lenses on the world. It is one thing to maintain that language and culture are linked, and to try and establish how. It’s another to suppose that the variety of language you speak determines your experience of the world. McWhorter cites the English verb “cook”. In Old English and its predecessors there was no generic word for cooking. You boiled things, roasted them, baked them, or whatever. That doesn’t mean that Anglo-Saxons had a more vivid experience of food than modern English speakers. Likewise, it wasn’t the complexities of Japanese grammar that made the Japanese navy vulnerable to American dive bombers at Midway in 1942. These are just how the languages are.
Put like that, the idea that language determines thought seems absurd. Why do people believe it? There is an understandable motivation. Peoples are diverse. Whorf analysed what were once popularly and falsely thought of as “primitive” tongues, such as the native American language Hopi, and demonstrated that their speakers were far from being primitive. It’s a short step from this fascination with the complexity of other languages to the notion that it invests their speakers with an understanding of the world that is more nuanced than the one possessed by, say, speakers of Standard English.
In George Orwell’s great invention of Newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four, striking a word from the language makes literally unthinkable the idea it expresses. That’s Whorfianism on a totalitarian scale. Yet the link in the real world is subtler. In McWhorter’s image, “language dances ever so lightly on thought”. The differences in language are variations on being the same. All humans have the innate faculty for learning a set of complex grammatical rules — Hopi, Flemish, Japanese, or one of thousands of others. That sameness, as McWhorter wisely suggests, is worth celebrating.
The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language by John H. McWhorter, OUP, 182pp; £12.99; ebook £12.99. To buy this book for £11.69, visitthetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134
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