Language and reality · Blog

This post is about a topic I find fascinating: linguistic relativism.

I felt like doing something different, so this time it's in audio format. Consider it an experiment to see if I switch to a podcast format or a mix between audio and text.

I'll leave the transcription below, in case you don't have patience for the 20 minutes it lasts…

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Transcription:

Mid-19th century. Full colonial era. The Irishman George Bowen, governor of Queensland, Australia, orders the establishment of a settlement in the north, in Pormpuraaw, at the tip of Cape York Peninsula. Next to it, the coast and a few kilometers away, the mouth of the Mitchell River.

Everything indicated it would be a good place for a sheltered port. And that it would have possibilities of becoming a key point of interest in international trade.

The brothers Frank and Alexander Jardine were tasked with supplying meat to the settlement. So they took their herds and set off to establish their grazing area there.

The journey wasn't peaceful, as confrontations with the aborigines in the area were constant. Logically, they were defending their territory.

It was upon reaching the banks of the Mitchell River when the conflict ended in tragedy.

The Jardines themselves wrote an account based on the event:

"While the cattle stopped they came across several aborigines fishing. These immediately crossed to the other shore, but returned swimming in a group armed with large bundles of spears to confront them. At first, the natives faced them bravely, but whether by accident or fear, desperation or stupidity, they huddled in a heap, in the water. Ten carbines fired volley after volley at them from all directions, killing and wounding them with each shot. In total about thirty would die."

Diplomacy, dialogue... were completely off the table, perhaps due to the inability to communicate with each other.

Hundreds of years later Cape York Peninsula is one of the largest wilderness areas in northern Australia. Savannas covered with eucalyptus... tropical forests... a rich and complex ecosystem protected for its environmental importance.

Grasslands also abound and they support the main economic driver of the area: cattle.

In contrast with the exuberant nature, the aboriginal community has been shrinking over the years. Currently only about 600 descendants of the indigenous people who confronted the Jardine brothers remain. Of which, at present, only about 200 speak their ancestral language: Kuuk Thaayorre.

In Kuuk Thaayorre there is no left or right, no up or down, only cardinal points in absolute relation. Therefore there is no right leg, no left arm... but there is the west arm or the southeast leg.

It's at the beginning of the 21st century when Dr. Lera Boroditsky, specialist in cognitive psychology, visits the area interested in this peculiar language. Her intention: to include it in one of her studies.

The experiment consisted of asking the participant to chronologically order a series of cards showing different temporal progressions: a man at different ages, a crocodile growing, a banana being eaten...

The study subjects were English, Hebrew, Chinese and some Australian aborigines whose native language was Kuuk Thaayorre.

The Englishman arranged the cards in chronological order from left to right, just like the direction of his writing.

The Hebrew speaker did it from right to left, just like in his.

The Chinese, from top to bottom.

The Australian, from east to west, absolutely. That is, when he sat facing north the sequence went from right to left, from east to west. When facing south, it went from left to right, equally from east to west. And all this, surprisingly, spontaneously, without need for a compass.

Lera Boroditsky was discovering or, rather, confirming, that language influences the perception of the direction of time and understanding of spatial orientation.

Her studies revolve around linguistic relativity. That is, analyzing how language modifies our way of thinking and relating to reality.

Whether language is or isn't a valid way to know reality was already something pre-Aristotelian thinkers pondered. Although their reflections were directed at the origin of proper names and what motivated their assignment. In fact, Plato dedicates practically all of his "Cratylus" to justifying the suitability of the names of gods, sometimes doing authentic linguistic acrobatics.

This name assignment came from a mythological figure: the onomatopoeia.

Although later philosophers flirt with studying the connection between language and thought, it's not until Wilhelm von Humboldt that linguistic relativity begins to take shape.

Humboldt, who lived between the 18th and 19th centuries, proposes, among many other things, that the variety of perceptions and frequency of exposure to them shapes language. And, the more important a concept is in a culture the more complexity it has.

In synonymous terms in many languages, diverse representations of the same object are given. This property of the word especially refers to the fact that each language incorporates a specific perspective of the world.

Already in the 20th century, Edward Sapir recovers Humboldt's idea that languages have the key to understanding the way each one perceives the world.

Sapir, together with his student Benjamin Lee Whorf, represent the so-called soft line of linguistic relativism (or Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), according to which language influences thought and decisions.

Sapir himself explains it very well with few words:

"No two languages are sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not simply the same world with different labels."

On the other hand we have the strong version or linguistic determinism, according to which language determines and limits different cognitive categories.

While the strong version hasn't had much support from the scientific community, the soft version has had acceptance and has been validated through different studies. With Lera Boroditsky being one of its most outstanding representatives.

"Lots of languages have grammatical gender; every noun gets assigned a gender, often masculine or feminine. And these genders differ across languages. So, for example, the sun is feminine in German but masculine in Spanish, and the moon, the reverse. Could this actually have any consequence for how people think? Do German speakers think of the sun as somehow more female-like, and the moon somehow more male-like? Actually, it turns out that's the case. So if you ask German and Spanish speakers to, say, describe a bridge, like the one here — «bridge» happens to be grammatically feminine in German, grammatically masculine in Spanish — German speakers are more likely to say bridges are «beautiful,» «elegant» and stereotypically feminine words. Whereas Spanish speakers will be more likely to say they're «strong» or «long,» these masculine words."

Under this premise that Dr. Boroditsky proposes, the gender of the word influences how we perceive an object. Taking into account the mental construct established by a bridge being masculine or feminine, how will a German engineer design a bridge? And a Spanish one?

Language constructs our reality.

And our way of expressing ourselves can be modified consciously to thus shape our way of thinking.

There are examples of this throughout history.

And not always for good.

Voltaire, Rousseau, shared the idea that different nations have different personalities. In Montesquieu we already find references to "the spirit of a nation", resulting from various factors: climate, religion... language...

This mentality plants the seed of what German pre-romanticists would call Volkgeist or spirit of the people, the spirit of a nation. With well-differentiated traits: cultural, racial, etc.

The Volkgeist claimed the recovery of an epic past, and of the elements that define a culture, language included.

And we already know how this ends.

We also have wonderful literary references to how governments manipulate language to modify citizens' thinking.

In Anthem by Ayn Rand, for example, the government eliminates individual names and pronouns to ensure the subjugation of the individual to the collective.

In 1984 by George Orwell, newspeak is constantly revised and simplified, thus reducing the population's capacity for expression and, therefore, their capacity for thought.

"Don't you see that the objective of newspeak is to reduce the range of thought? In the end we will make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words to express it."

The assimilation of a specific language to understand reality in a specific way also occurs in smaller communities: skaters, rappers, surfers, musicians, geeks... and also in the business environment.

In 1929 Sapir stated:

"Human beings do not live only in an objective world, nor only in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society."

Corporate culture generates its own language that employees assimilate. This, in turn, is shaped by the use they give it, which influences the company's culture.

In this cyclical process language receives influences from new additions to the staff, who see how their way of expressing themselves and corporate culture are renewed with the introduction of realities that were foreign to it.

This impacts the organization's processes and how those who belong to it solve their tasks.

Programming languages probably also have a strong impact on thought. Anyone who regularly deals with development teams will have noticed that short and very specific sentences are more efficient for communicating with them. Perhaps writing for a machine to understand us exerts a greater influence on us than we think.

On the other hand, using expressions like "agile methodologies", "giving it a spin", "makers" introduces us into a very defined framework of thought that will shape the way we face different situations.

User is another one of those words that, perhaps, defines the way we design, without being conscious of it.

The first two meanings of the RAE say:

One who uses something.
Said of a person: Who has the right to use someone else's thing with certain limitation.

Maybe simply changing the word "user" to "person" we can produce more human designs.

George Orwell, in Politics and the English language, writes about the mental impact of unconsciously letting oneself be carried away by the use of clichés:

"You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you. They will even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent. And at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself."

We could oppose these reductionist forms of language and, therefore, of reality, by expanding our vocabulary and making more specific and conscious use of our way of expressing ourselves. Thus altering our own reality. And that of the people around us.

Similarly, learning new languages will make us enter a process of acculturation. Which consists of incorporating cultural elements from another group. Different realities, new worlds.

How many universes are we missing with the languages that are becoming extinct?

Probably that of the Thaayorre will be one of them.

As Charlemagne said:

To speak a second language is to have a second soul.

References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pormpuraaw,_Queensland

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboriginal_Shire_of_Pormpuraaw

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Bowen

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Lascelles_Jardine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_von_Humboldt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Lee_Whorf