JOHN MCWHORTER SEPTEMBER 2, 2010
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LANGUAGE AS THOUGHT: WATCH OUT FOR THE HYPE
Judging from how the Times magazine’s excerpt from Guy Deutscher’s new book has been one of the most read pieces in the paper for over a week now, the book is on its way to libating readers ever eager for the seductive idea that people’s languages channel the way they think--that is, that grammar creates cultural outlooks.
“Oooh-mmmm!” I heard in a room once when a linguist parenthetically suggested that the reason speakers of one Native American language have prefixes instead of words to indicate mixing, poking, and sucking on food is because they are “culturally” attuned to such things.
But don’t we all cherish poking and sucking? As cool as it would be if grammar were thought, the idea is a myth--at least in any form that would be of interest beyond academic psychologists.
Deutscher is to be commended for noting that the original version of this idea has not held up. Fire-inspector-by-day Benjamin Lee Whorf claimed in the thirties that Hopi has no way to indicate tense, and thus created a cyclical sense of time among its speakers. But Hopi has plenty of words and suffixes to indicate tense, and the whole idea that Hopi was a substrate for a mystical frame of mind has fallen to pieces.
But Deutscher’s idea is that a new thread of work is showing that language does create thought patterns nevertheless. The upshot is supposed to be that human groups are going about with their grammatical structures lending them fascinatingly different Ways of Looking at the World.
Deutcher’s favorite evidence is peoples who sense direction not as a matter of front and back but as north, south, east and west. In their languages you say not “in front of me” but “west of me” and so on--meaning that where if we were turned around after saying something was in front of us we’d say that it was now in back of us, speakers of these languages would still say that it was west of them.
Neat. But are these people’s languages making them sensitive to direction rather than position--or is it, as almost anyone would intuit, that the culture focuses on direction and thus the language does? Americans have a plethora of terms referring to psychology--complex, affect, syndrome, superego, compensation. Yet who would say that it’s the English language that makes us sensitive to these things? It sounds like something a Martian anthropologist might come up with, too eager for the exotic to perceive--or settle for--the more mundane truth.
In the actual book, Deutscher attempts to flick away objections like this by noting that groups next door to direction-focused ones, culturally similar to their neighbors, often just refer to front and back like we do--and that this must mean that cultural differences of some kind drive the difference in grammar.
And that’s right--but it undercuts Deutscher’s initial argument. Sure, there are cultural differences--but the idea that the reason the direction-focused group thinks the way it does is because of their language puts the cart before the horse.
Nor does other evidence Deutscher shows indicate that grammar gives people “different ways of seeing the world” in the sense that most of us would find earth-shaking. Speakers of languages with gender are more likely to imagine--if asked on a survey, which typically they never are--feminine nouns talking with higher voices than masculine ones. So, your French friend, if you woke her up in the middle of the night, would be more likely to imagine a table--feminine la table-- talking like Meryl Streep than you would. OK--but is this “a way of looking at the world”? Does your friend think of tables as ladies? Ask her--she doesn’t.
Or--many languages have a word that covers both green and blue. Call it “grue.” Their speakers distinguish blue and green very slightly less quickly than English speakers do. Is this a “world view”? I can only quote my erstwhile UC Berkeley colleague Paul Kay with Willett Kempton here: “If the differences in world view are to be interesting, they must be sizeable. Minuscule differences are dull.”
Yet the coverage of the book will leave an implication that there are people thinking of boats as having to shave. This is to be resisted. One reason is that some languages have more grammar than others. Treat the north/south language as itself creating a “world view,” and then think about a more telegraphic language without endings and much of what makes grammars especially complicated, such as Chinese.
Some decades ago, a researcher floated the idea that in leaving the difference between “If you see” and “If you were to see” to context, Chinese renders its speakers less sensitive to the hypothetical than English speakers. I don’t even need to describe the response to that one--suffice it to say there wasn’t a hint of “Oooh-mmmm!”
YIDDISH IS ALIVE AND WELL
On a regular basis the media tells us that Yiddish is dying--in that there is a shrinking market for literature in the language. Alas, one cannot keep a Yiddish bookstore open even in New York City. And although there are students learning the language in college and a healthy amount of activities and programs seeking to preserve it, there are those who say that the very existence of efforts like these signals that the language will never truly live again (with the revival of Hebrew being the one true exception).
But what about the hundreds of thousands of people who use Yiddish as an everyday language in the home decade after decade--namely, Hasidic Jews?
For example, 90 percent of the 13,000-plus residents of the Hasidic town of Kiryas Joel in New York State speak Yiddish in the home. And they tend to have huge families--that is, kids are being raised in it, as I have twice seen in Hasidic families I encountered on airplanes. (To wit: My intrusive question “Excuse me, are you speaking Yiddish????? And the answer, “Oh, yes... ” with a slight perplexity that I would even find it interesting.) At last count in 2006, about 150,000 Americans alone spoke Yiddish at home. There are about 20,000 more in Canada, and many more elsewhere.
Whence the idea, then, that Yiddish is dying? The problem is a notion that a language doesn’t really exist unless it is thriving on the page. But that is, frankly, an illusion due to the invention of print just several centuries ago. There are about 6000 languages in the world, and only about 200 are written in any real way. That is, there are 5800 languages that are only spoken--and yet tell their speakers that the languages they learn on their mommies’ knee are not “real”!
Remember that New Yorker piece a few years ago about the Amazonian tribe called the Piraha who don’t really have numbers? It’s never written except by linguists, but it’s surely real. I study an English-Portuguese-Dutch-African hybrid spoken by 20,000 descendants of escaped slaves in the Surinam rain forest. It is written only by linguists and missionaries. Yet the number of its speakers stays relatively constant; it is not endangered. Saramaccan, as this language is called, is surely real--albeit spoken by a mere seventh as many people as Yiddish is.
Yiddish, then, is not dying in the least. There would seem to be a notion that if it is only being spoken casually in homes then it is not alive--but this is nonsensical. I know what a dying language is--a Native American language now spoken only by people in late middle age or older that youngsters of the culture only know some words of. That is, most Native American languages or the Aboriginal languages in Australia. Languages die, as I have commented on in this slot.
That is not Yiddish. Is Yiddish literature no longer what it once was? Obviously. Is there a strip of Yiddish-language theatres on Second Avenue in New York City? Last time I checked, no. Are there now Molly Goldbergs saying “Yoo-hoo” out of their tenement windows speaking a Yiddishe-inflected English? No--and for the record, even Gertude Berg didn’t actually talk that way in real life. But is Yiddish dying? Feh! Languages like Navajo should have it so good.
Language likely traces to the birth of our species 150,000 years ago. Writing started about 5500 years ago. Which means that if language had only existed for 24 hours, writing would only have come along after 11 PM. A language is what people speak. Any sense that its robust persistence among Hasids is somehow “not real” is, if you think about it, a claim that they are somehow not real people. Upon which they might venture “Geh kaken oifen yam!”
BLACKS HAVE BEEN USING THE N-WORD AFFECTIONATELY FOREVER
We are much affected by the queer fact that while whites are supposed to think of the N-word as the most taboo word in the English language, black men can call each other IT with abandon. It’s what did in Dr. Laura’s radio career.
But too often the in-group use of the N-word is treated as something modern. Supposedly it was something that happened in the wake of, maybe rap? The common notion seems to be that black men calling each other N-word is about 25 years old.
Wrong. The black use of the N-word is not something unique to our times and whatever is wrong or right with them--it’s old, old news, which a certain kind of music happens to have made more obvious to people beyond black America.
First let’s go back to the fifties--i.e. when Martin Luther King was starting to turn America upside down in Montgomery. Here is Claude Brown’s biographical account of growing up in Harlem in the 1940s and 1950s, Manchild in the Promised Land. Someone warmly counsels Brown in the fifties:
You’re one of these complacent niggers out here who managed to get by and not have it bother them directly ... when the shit comes down on you, you’re going to be one of the angriest niggers out here on this street, man ... you see all these niggers running out here talking about they want some white girl. Damn, I don’t want me nothin’ but a nigger woman.
Note how “nigger woman” is intended as a compliment, and examples like these are hardly rare.
The fifties too recent? In the thirties in Mules and Men, Zora Neale Hurston collected black folk tales full of warm references to blacks themselves as “niggers”--and it was warmly reviewed in none other than the NAACP’s house organ The Crisis. Hurston herself had Big Nigger as the working title for her (autobiographical!) novel Jonah’s Gourd Vine.
We can go even further back, with equivalent words. Here is a song lyric from 1898 by none other than one of the Blacks in Wax Paul Laurence Dunbar, with music by imperious, mustachioed black Will Marion Cook who smashed his violin to pieces when identified by a white man as the “best colored violinst”:
Warm coons a’ prancin’ / Swell coons a’dancin’. / Tough coons who’ll want to fight ...
They were knuckling under to what whites wanted? Tempting and reasonable supposition, but we have to be careful in painting people from a hundred years ago as versions of ourselves except with fancier clothes and no internet. Cook came away from the premiere of the show that lyric was sung in crowing that black people had arrived on Broadway at last, pegging it as one of the milestones of his life. And we can know how a Cook would have felt about that lyric, from the kind of thing now hidden in ancient numbers of black newspapers.
The Indianapolis Freeman’s Sylvester Russell, its main drama critic, knew his racism quite well and staged a sit-in sixty years before they became common. He had no use for “nigger.” Yet he casually noted in 1904 that “The Negro race has no objections to the word “coon.” And in his time, “ace boon coon” was current slang among blacks for “best friend”--and is still used in warm irony now in some black quarters.
To be sure, the word elicited controversy just as nigger does now. The following year Russell interviewed black stage composer superstar Bob Cole, who was dedicated to showing whites blacks’ dignity by doing his vaudeville act in black tie and writing gem-like “genteel” songs (the one with any resonance today is “Under the Bamboo Tree”). Cole said “The word ‘coon’ is very insinuating and must soon be eliminated.”
But then, Cole had no problem with, of all things, “darkey”!
The upshot of this gaslight-era ethnic lexicography is, quite simply, plus ça change.
The reason one might feel that one has been hearing the black use of the N-word “lately” is because one has heard rap only “lately,” and because only “lately” has there been a regular string of black stand-up comedy shows on television and black comedy films. Before all this, the same stuff was going on, just largely unrecorded--i.e. in spoken language, always thriving, be it on the streets of Detroit or Kiryas Joel.
33 comments
I thought this was a great article but I couldn't follow your reasoning on the first page, when you wrote "And that’s right--but it undercuts Deutscher’s initial argument". I don't see how that's the case.. it may not do much to help his argument (there are a million differences besides language that could cause the cultural difference that ultimately led to this difference in grammar) but I can't figure out why it undercuts his argument.
- Simon Greenwood
September 11, 2010 at 8:22am
This seemed to me to be more 3 articles slapped together. As to Yiddish, you still hear yiddish on the radio in Northern New Jersey on the am dial (or you did the last time I was there) coming out of, I take it, NYC. And Yinglish has filtered down to most people. I know tons of Yiddish words that I would have unlikely have known had I grown up in Arkansas. As to language, I have no idea how much language shapes thought. I am able to express the same ideas in Chinese or English. I do wonder though how much the writing styles effect the growth of the mind. Chinese children need learn thousands of characters, in English we only have the alphabet. This is also taught at a very young age. I am curious as to the effect on brain physiology and development between literate Chinese and literate Westerners. Also, Eastern tonal languages allow the people to be more attuned to pitch. I read once that a Chinese musician is able to identify a single note more readily than a Western one. I don't know if it is true, I do know that the tones of Chinese are the most difficult language complication I have ever met. Reading Chinese is a cinch comparatively. My first few years in China I went with a notebook and often wrote down what I wanted on the spot because I mangled the tone. (although, honestly, I never got why they couldn't get context in many cases)
- blackton
September 11, 2010 at 11:32am
"But Deutscher’s idea is that a new thread of work is showing that language does create thought patterns nevertheless." This is not what Deutcher said. He argues that language doesn't impose strict structures of thought on its uses, but it does impose certain constraints on what can or can't be articulated. For example in languages with gender markers speakers have to identify themselves in terms of gender. In languages such as Spanish, French, Hebrew, German, etc. if you say I spent some time with a friend the gender of that friend becomes obvious to the listener. In English this is not the case. There is also the case of verb structures: some language has subjunctive and conditional tenses (that designate states contrary to fact) which while formerly available in English is not used anymore. I believe that Jane Austen was among the last writers to use the subjunctive tense liberally in her novels. Deutcher did not endorse the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which states that speakers of a certain language have to think in certain ways the world and that the structure of the language makes it impossible for them to understand certain concepts. He explicitly rejected this view. Speakers can acquire other languages and multilingual subject are not constrained by any single language.
- jdyer
September 11, 2010 at 12:23pm
Good contrarian stuff. My father was a yiddish teacher and a yiddishist whose spoke a "voiler" yiddish and would've liked to have read your contrarianism on the premature obituary. As to the argument about Deutscher: isn't McWhorter saying that when D. says that cultural factors--"that cultural differences of some kind drive the difference in grammar"--drive groups' grammatical differences, he cuts against his original thesis that: ...But Deutscher’s idea is that a new thread of work is showing that language does create thought patterns nevertheless. The upshot is supposed to be that human groups are going about with their grammatical structures lending them fascinatingly different Ways of Looking at the World.... There seems to me some chicken and eggism here: where does the dynamic interplay between culture affecting langauge affecting culture stop and start as between the players, even short of language and language structures channeling something as large as world view or even significant outlooks? As to the use of the the word "Nigger" being alive and well in some black precincts and any by some black speakers, what tuns on that?
- basman
September 11, 2010 at 12:36pm
jack: 1. McWhorter says thatt "Deutscher is to be commended for noting that the original version of this idea"---that language channels modes of thought-- "has not held up." I don't read him to be saying, as you intimate, as i read you, that D. endorses Whorf's thesis, which I was taught, in 1965, was unassailable. 2. It's probably me but either: ...but it (language, grammatical structures) does impose certain constraints on what can or can't be articulated... is a truism or there's something in what you say that I'm not sufficiently appreciating.
- basman
September 11, 2010 at 12:46pm
A friend of mine, a former student of my father's who does a lot to keep his name remembered: wrote this to me. My friend's name is Gerry and the reference to Leibl is to my father: ..Yes, Yiddish lives, and people like Dovid Katz, in his book Words on Fire, point to the Chasidim or Haredi community, as the carriers to the future of Yiddish. But, the Yiddish they speak is becoming more and more detached from the "modern" post haskala, modern Yiddish that was the language that Leibl taught. The speakers and writer base of that language is becoming thinner and thinner. Modern Yiddish, in its cultural expression was a secular language. It was the mame loshn of people like Marc Chagall, Isaac Bashevis, Irving Howe and Isak Babel. That secular, modern culture was almost destroyed by Hitler, Stalin and Zionist ideology that fought Yiddish in Israel. The Chasidic and Haredi community never accepted the idea of a modern Yidishkayt. Their only cultural expression was that of Torah learning. In that end they set up the religious publishing houses, and newspaper network that supported the idea of " toyreh iz di beste skhoyre." Sholem Aleichem, Peretz, Isaac Bashevis, and Rivke Basman were treyf to them. The upshot is that many modern Yiddish speakers would have difficulty following a Chsyidish conversation. There are many religious allusions that are not part of our cultural journey anymore, they've bent the grammar in ways that would drive Leibl crazy. But, hey, they speak Yiddish. And that's good. Good for them only or also for he larger Jewish community? I don't know if that larger community will take enough notice of them to help make Yiddish a contributing part to the culture of that larger community. The Chasidim are publishing newspaper, children's story books. They've even published a couple of novels in Yiddish -- written by women. Is this the start of a more liberal cultural expression? Ver veys...
- basman
September 11, 2010 at 2:51pm
“….but it (language, grammatical structures) does impose certain constraints on what can or can't be articulated...” I think that for Deutscher it’s not “what can not be articulated” that is important, but what has to be articulated. This is why the example about gender markers is so important to him. In many languages you can’t hide the gender of the speaker or of the people she or he associates with. In English you can. In Hebrew (and probably other Semitic languages) for example you disclose the gender of the subject through the verb: hence “I walk” which is gender neutral in English and even in Spanish isn’t gender neutral in Hebrew and other languages. Personally, I take comfort from the fact that one can’t impose a universal world view on humanity since different peoples speaks different languages and views the world through the prism of these various tongues. Normblog has a succinct post on this Deutscher’s view: http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2010/09/the-shape-of-what-you-think.html
- jdyer
September 11, 2010 at 3:10pm
p.s: Rivke Basman, mentioned by my friend Gerry, is an Israeli poet who writes in, and translates into, Yiddish, and was married to the now deceased Israeli expressionist artist Mula Ben Haim, an original painting by whom, and a gift from whom to to my wife and me, has dominated my various living rooms for about 3O years now, is my first cousin. Her father, Chatzkel, who with his son Aaron were killed by the Nazis--Rifke herself a concentration camp survivor--was my father's brother. Hence, in measure of how the world goes, my nephew Chatzkel/Ken Basman is a jazz guitarist and record producer living in Mexico--San Miguel to be exact--and his son Aaron Basman has the Ashkenaz blood of the Basmans and the mixed Hispanic Indian blood of his mother coursing through him, while my grandson Leo/Leibl William Pearce Basman carries my father's name, as does, less directly, my own daughter Lainie. I could tell you about my other daughter being named for family on my wife's side, but at that point mightn't I risk losing the interest of whomever has been rapt thus far--(:-)--I ask self deprecatingly.
- basman
September 11, 2010 at 3:44pm
One of the interesting things about the subjunctive in modern German is that it is used relatively seldom in ordinary conversation but a great deal in journalism. Its conditionality is very useful for making a statement that is more a focused speculation than an assertion, and thus good for avoiding complaint and even litigation. So if a source in this country provides information that e.g. Candidate X for the U.S. Senate beat his wife, a reasonably decent newspaper would have to be careful to contextualize the accusation, decide how to handle the source's quote, and generally appear not to be claiming a fact where no fact may yet be established. In Germany, however, where Candidate Y is running for election to the Bundestag, that whole problem is neatly sidestepped quite simply and efficiently by using the subjunctive "Der Kandidat habe seine Ehefrau gepruegelt" instead of the regular past "Der Kandidat hat seine Ehefrau gepreugelt." Everybody reads it, but the syntax by itself means that the article has not legally asserted anything as a fact.
- ironyroad
September 11, 2010 at 3:56pm
jack I looked at Normblog, the link for which I thank you and I read part of the excerpt of Deutscher's linked to therein. I found myself (from the bit I read) a tad underwhelmed by his argument and inclined to agree with McWhorter's assessment that: ...I can only quote my erstwhile UC Berkeley colleague Paul Kay with Willett Kempton here: “If the differences in world view are to be interesting, they must be sizeable. Minuscule differences are dull.” Yet the coverage of the book will leave an implication that there are people thinking of boats as having to shave. This is to be resisted. One reason is that some languages have more grammar than others. Treat the north/south language as itself creating a “world view,” and then think about a more telegraphic language without endings and much of what makes grammars especially complicated, such as Chinese. Some decades ago, a researcher floated the idea that in leaving the difference between “If you see” and “If you were to see” to context, Chinese renders its speakers less sensitive to the hypothetical than English speakers. I don’t even need to describe the response to that one--suffice it to say there wasn’t a hint of “Oooh-mmmm!”... Just to take one example as a possible microcosmic case, one of the examples you refer to: Deutscher makes a point of in English saying "I had dinner with my neighbor" without revealing gender with that being impossible say in French. Mildly interesting but so what in the way say of drawing cultural generalizations? If a French speaker wishes to equivocate on gender s/he can by saying something else. And if there is no telling generalization that can be drawn from the difference between gender specific and gender indeterminate language structures, what's the big geshrey? Or, as McWhorter would say, where's the “Oooh-mmmm”?
- basman
September 11, 2010 at 4:22pm
One last point: ...Personally, I take comfort from the fact that one can’t impose a universal world view on humanity since different peoples speaks different languages and views the world through the prism of these various tongues... Apart from the question of the extent to which language affects world view, a thesis both McWhorter and Deutscher discredit, I'd mention that Mark Abley in his accessible, popularizing and extremely well written book, The Prodigal Tongue, which I'm just under 1/2 way through, makes the point that the closest we come to in a universal language is English manifest as a "glocal" language in its world wide use. The notion of glocal is a mixture of local variation with enough standard English that the glocal speaker can be universally understood even while retaining enough of his unique, local variation of English so as to demarcate it as such.
- basman
September 11, 2010 at 5:30pm
ironyroad “One of the interesting things about the subjunctive in modern German is that it is used relatively seldom in ordinary conversation but a great deal in journalism. Its conditionality is very useful for making a statement that is more a focused speculation than an assertion, and thus good for avoiding complaint and even litigation. So if a source in this country provides information that e.g. Candidate X for the U.S. Senate beat his wife, a reasonably decent newspaper would have to be careful to contextualize the accusation, decide how to handle the source's quote, and generally appear not to be claiming a fact where no fact may yet be established.” That’s an interesting example, Irony. However, what is interesting to me is the fact that some languages do have verbal aspects that allow you to state contrary fact situation while other don’t. Of course, different languages use the subjunctive differently. Spanish speakers used it as well as the conditional tense quite often in daily speech. Ancient Greek had a verb mood called optative which is absent from most modern languages. These verbal modalities of a language help express a sense of reality (or contrary to reality as the case may be) which is absent in other languages.
- jdyer
September 11, 2010 at 5:38pm
With which other languages besides English are you on intimate terms, Itzik?
- jdyer
September 11, 2010 at 5:40pm
The notion that language shapes culture (and vice versa) has always seem so obvious to me that I'm always astonished that intelligent people can find the notion to be incredible. You would have to ignore or discard every visceral experience of the differences between, say, Germans and Italians, and the ways in which they correlate perfectly with their languages. "Achtung" and "Attenzione, per favore" invoke and reflect different experiences of the world. The most learned and extensive meditation on the mystery of language that I've read is George Steiner's "After Babel". I found it ultimately unsatisfying because Steiner feels obliged to dismiss as "unscientific" all the fascinating studies of the relation between language and culture that he brings to the reader's attention. Ultimately he remains committed to the scientific paradigm which requires proof of a demonstrable relationship of cause and effect. Unfortunately, slippery stuff like reciprocal relationships of co-creation don't fit the mold, so it all gets thrown in the waste-basket. My favorite example of this phenomenon is flowers and insects like butterflies and bees, neither of which could exist without the other. The very notion that both were evolved simultaneously, and had to be, is anathema to scientific thinking but quite obvious to any reasonable observer whose notion of truth is not delimited by lab experiments. Ah, those French with their finely modulated vowel sounds, their tricky spelling, their sensitive noses, their 365 cheeses made for discriminating palates, their savoir-faire, their complex cookery, their passionate expository prose, their intellectual contorsionism--how different they are from the nearby Italians with their five simple vowels always pronounced the same way, their phonetic spelling where everything is always as it sounds, their "Rs" which vibrate in their chests rather than in the back of their throats, their simple cooking with fresh ingredients, their hearty wines that delight the whole body and not just the head. Just coincidence? Language and culture are intimately and inextricably bound in a mirroring relationship everywhere they occur together, i.e., wherever human society exists. Having no way to prove it doesn't make it not so.
- willjames77
September 11, 2010 at 6:33pm
willjames77 “The notion that language shapes culture (and vice versa) has always seem so obvious to me that I'm always astonished that intelligent people can find the notion to be incredible.” Yes, there is a dialectical relation between language and culture. However, other factors also come into play, geography and climate, for example. Then there is the little noticed fact that technological changes which also affect human culture. Language, though, is certainly part of the mix. I agree with your assessment of Steiner’s ‘After Babel.”
- jdyer
September 11, 2010 at 8:38pm
...With which other languages besides English are you on intimate terms, Itzik?... None, linguistically deprived me must confess but I've had a few dalliances here and there and I have literary aptitudes. Generally, the issue here isn't, I don't think, whether languages shape culture--whatever that means exactly-- no one would say would say, would they, that language and cultures don't affect each other--but is whether the structures of particular languages drive their speakers' views of the world or significant cultural outlooks that are less than views of the world. The lower one goes down a scale of the cultural significance of the effects of different languages, 37 words for snow compared to one, or whatever, the closer one gets, I'd contend, to McWhorter's assessment of a relative lack of oomph to the point Deutscher argues for. I'd be happy to get an example or examples that reveal something significant about cultural differences driven by the properties of the languages being compared, if someone cares to make and illustrate that case.
- basman
September 11, 2010 at 8:38pm
I spent some time in Romania in the mid-1990s, and I was struck by the seductive oddness of the Romanian language, with its mixture of Latinate and more obscure regional elements. Romanians speaking often sound like Poles speaking Italian or something like that. It's may sound a bit eccentric to us, but Romanians' feeling that they have been unjustly rejected and stigmatized by the West is often backed up by their claim that they are a Western (or at least Central) European country and that can be proven by their language.
- ironyroad
September 11, 2010 at 10:49pm
It would take a book length study to show how language influences culture but I would suggest that I day to day life the interaction between peoples in say South America are distinct from those of Anglo North America. This is due in part to the structure of the languages. English speaking America is more pragmatic and direct in its approach to every day problems than are Spanish speaking peoples. It’s no accident that both Empiricism and Pragmatism originated in English speaking countries. It’s also no accident that the most popular genre in Latin America are romances (which are today called tele-novelas and which also exist in graphic book forms). Daily life in many of these countries is lived between the conditional tense and the subjunctive which is to say between the hypothetical if---then and the contrary to fact subjunctive mood. I am being facetious but not by much. Also relations among people in languages with polite forms (that distinguishes between the familiar and the formal forms of address) is very different from those in languages that do not acknowledge such distinctions. In Japanese, for example, “Politeness” “Japanese has an extensive grammatical system to express politeness and formality. The Japanese language can express differing levels in social status. The differences in social position are determined by a variety of factors including job, age, experience, or even psychological state (e.g., a person asking a favour tends to do so politely). The person in the lower position is expected to use a polite form of speech, whereas the other might use a more plain form. Strangers will also speak to each other politely. Japanese children rarely use polite speech until they are teens, at which point they are expected to begin speaking in a more adult manner. See uchi-soto.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_language#Politeness As I said this is a complex issue that would take a long study to do justice to it.
- jdyer
September 11, 2010 at 11:10pm
ironyroad "I spent some time in Romania in the mid-1990s, and I was struck by the seductive oddness of the Romanian language, with its mixture of Latinate and more obscure regional elements." I have met people who speak Romanian and I what you wrote is what I thought when I heard them speak.
- jdyer
September 11, 2010 at 11:11pm
I was also thinking of the mixture of Anglo Saxon and Norman French (both peoples originated from the north of Western Europe but how different they are! could it be the influence of the languages they ended up speaking?) In any case, modern English is the result of the mixing of these two different language systems and its mixture it seems to me resulted in the simplification of the language and I would guess an eventual wholehearted embrace of Empiricism.
- jdyer
September 11, 2010 at 11:16pm
JD -- I found Romania a fascinating place. Sometimes you could easily imagine yourself in some Eric Ambler novel set in the '40s or the '50s. I got to know a few Romanian Germans and spent more time speaking German there than anything else. Oddly enough -- or not -- the Romanian Germans were often the most outward looking and progressive people one met, partly because of having two languages and partly because the few who stayed after Genscher said "the door is open" in 1989 tended to be a collection of oddballs (often journalists, independent academics and the like) who didn't feel any particular tribal urge to leave. The departure of the German Romanians from the Transylvanian villages and farms they had occupied for 400 years is one of the small European tragedies of the post Cold War era. One understands their motives but it's sad: they left their home places and moved to e.g. a high-rise housing project outside Stuttgart or Hannover, with some family farm implement now mounted over the mantel as a souvenir of a lost past. For their part, ethnic Romanians who were quick to say "good riddance" came to regret what they had wanted so enthusiastically to wave "goodbye" to. The historical irony is, these people were never Germans in the state-identity sense. They were for most of those four centuries subjects of the Hapsburg empire, and if anything Austrians rather than Germans (although they came originally from the Rhineland). Although they suffered after the war for being German (several years' removal to the Soviet Union), the leaders of the Romanian German community were very nervous of the Nazis in the 1930s and thought that aggressive German policies in the East could seriously endanger long-standing German communities like theirs. They were, of course, right.
- ironyroad
September 12, 2010 at 4:25am
Irony, I remember that one of the stranger episodes in Kaplan's "Balkan Ghosts" was his account of the fate of the Romanian Germans, of whose existence I had never had the slightest notion. I had a friend in California who grew up in a village in Transylvania where four languages were spoken regularly in his small valley: Hungarian, German, Yiddish and some local tongue. He grew up speaking them all and continued to acquire additional languages with facility after a couple years of living and working in various countries during his post-war peregrinations. We met at a hippy-ish Passover seder many years ago, and he was especially pleased to run into someone in the hinterlands of northern California who was able to appreciate his Hebrew joke with a Russian punchline. The Romanians that I meet in Italy who come seeking work all seem to master the language in remarkable time. From what I can see, growing up with a mish-mash of languages around you definitely seems to correlate with an enhanced capacity for language acquisition later in life.
- willjames77
September 12, 2010 at 5:34am
Jackson, I enjoyed your musings about the diffs between Japanese and Latins and the North Americanos. We tend to dismiss "mere impressions" of cultural differences as scientifically unworthy. But I'm not sure there's a better way to explore such slippery topics. When I hear Americans speaking after spending extending time around Europeans, it always strikes me how much of the discourse focuses around "information exchange" and how perfectly suitable English is as a sort of neutral medium for the trading of bits and bytes. In Italy someone whose name is Massimiliano is referred to when he comes up in conversation as "Massimiliano"--not Mac or Max as we would instantly do in the States. There are rhythmical patterns that apply whenever people chat with each other, rhetorical tropes as it were. The information exchange is embedded in a kind of linguistic dramatic performance which is inseparable from the content. The French do something similar although it's much more formulaic, like the lilting sing-songy greeting, "Bonjour Monsieurs-Dames" when you enter a shop. How would anyone really explain the difference between this melodious stuff and our flat, "Hi, can I help you" and "Have a nice day"? Except to note that our language and our behavioral modes fit each other perfectly--just as do those of the world's other cultures.
- willjames77
September 12, 2010 at 7:00am
ironyroad "JD -- I found Romania a fascinating place." It probably is. I am not familiar with the history of Romanians of German origin, (the treatment of Gypsies in that country is pretty dreadful) but the Russians of German origin were pretty badly oppressed by Stalin even though they were German in name only, and unlike the German Poles, supported the Soviet Union during WW2. In any case, one of the weakness of Guy Deutscher’s article (the book might be different) is that he did not treat bilingual communities as a distinct culture. They differ from monolingual communities yet I know of no major work in English that has studied those distinct communities.
- jdyer
September 12, 2010 at 10:28am
WJ "Except to note that our language and our behavioral modes fit each other perfectly--just as do those of the world's other cultures." I agree yet, let's remember also that the charming singsong can also serve as a code that differentiates between classes and peoples that shows some people to be subservient and others dominant.
- jdyer
September 12, 2010 at 10:36am
Actually, just looking at McWhorter's post again, having meant to respond further to Jack, I'm not so sure that Simon Greenwood was wrong to say he couldn't follow McWhorter's reasoning with respect to direction and position. I may have been too quick to defend McWhorter's reasoning. Just to try to restate the lines of reasoning: McWhorter argues that culture drives language. Deutscher argues that language does create "thought patterns", that grammatical structures shapes the way language participants see the world. Deutscher offers as prime evidence some languages using the language of position--front, back, etc.--others use the language of directionality--North, East South, West. To that McWhorter suggests as a matter of intuition rather than argues "that the culture focuses on direction and thus the language does." He then gives the example of a host of terms referring to psychology and rejects any suggestion that it's the English language as such that makes us aware--"sensitive to"--of the described phenomena. McWhorter says that in Deutscher's book, Deutscher dismisses objections to his example and to culture driven rather than language driven arguments by noting that, according to McWhorter, culturally similar neighbors to the direction folks will often speak the language of position as we do in North America. (This is where I really start to get bogged down.) McWhorter says that Deutscher says of the example of these neighbors: "--and that this must mean that cultural differences of some kind drive the difference in grammar." On reflection I don't follow that at all. As a matter of sheer logic, if one culturally similar neighbor uses direction and the other culturally similar neighbor use position, then it must be differences in language driving the different use, not differences in culture. I'm assuming, though it's not stated, that each neighbor speaks a different language. Then it seems to get worse: "And that’s right--but it undercuts Deutscher’s initial argument. Sure, there are cultural differences--but the idea that the reason the direction-focused group thinks the way it does is because of their language puts the cart before the horse." What's right: the seeming erroneous conclusion that cultural differences drive the difference between direction and position? I can see how the seeming erroneous conclusion undercuts the original argument: the seeming erroneous conclusion is culture based; the orginal argument is language based. But I don't see, again, the warrant for the seeming erroneous conclusion. And I don't see how McWhorter's argument is helped by him noting that North Americans speak of position just as do ont he culturally similar but far away neighbors. if anything the triad of speakers--two culturally similar, one culturally different, all speaking, presumably different languages--adds more in favor of a language drives culture argument rather than a culture drives language argument. And, finally, I don't at all see, on the basis strictly of these supposed lines of reasoning, how McWhorter can assertively say--and I repeat-- "but the idea that the reason the direction-focused group thinks the way it does is because of their language puts the cart before the horse." This I now conclude within the context of the above specific arguments is asserted rather than properly made out. If someone can unpack this better than I have, and clarify, the soundness of McWhorter's arguments here, I'd be obliged.
- basman
September 12, 2010 at 1:27pm
What you wrote is interesting, Itzik. However, I don’t have the time to dissect McWhorter's post. Perhaps in another lifetime.
- jdyer
September 12, 2010 at 3:23pm
willjames -- Transylvania is genuinely a cultural convergence point in that part of Europe. Many towns and cities have at least three versions of their name, German, Romanian, and Hungarian. My guess is the Latinate roots and "feel" of Romanian help Romanians to acquire Italian faster.
- ironyroad
September 12, 2010 at 5:15pm
Another lifetime it is.
- basman
September 12, 2010 at 5:59pm
interesting thread, just a few comments. If I were to see and If I see are both ideas easily expressible in Chinese, I would just use different words for each context, so I wouldn't get too wrapped up in that aspect. One other thing it has been my experience that personality types outweighs language and culture, which is why I can have a Chinese family and friends and close Mexican friends. If you get past the attitude that culture and language is insurmountable, or even a real barrier, then you can do fine.
- blackton
September 12, 2010 at 7:54pm
blackton "One other thing it has been my experience that personality types outweighs language and culture, which is why I can have a Chinese family and friends and close Mexican friends. If you get past the attitude that culture and language is insurmountable, or even a real barrier, then you can do fine." I don't know about "personality types," but you right that individuals do surmount the limitations of their culture and language. This is what translation is all about: real multilingualism is rare but it does exist.
- jdyer
September 12, 2010 at 8:05pm
One of the smartest guys I know said this: ..I think what's confusing things here is an odd distinction between language and culture. Language just IS culture, or a big part of it. Culture generally, and hence language in particular, are driven by adaptive processes to the world they're embedded in. But neither one is the either the cart or the horse (unless you want to picture a cart with a horse sitting in it)... I answered im as follows: ...Illuminating point Meta and maybe you're making a point I insufficiently grasp. But at first blush at least, I don't find the distinction so odd but, rather, a natural and sensible one to make. Isn't there a distinction to be drawn between nature and culture regardless of how they affect each other? And even if we say they are both driven by adaptive processes to the world they are "embedded" in, that doesn't, it seems to me, obviate distinguishing between them, just as we can distinguish amongst thought, culture and nature, especially since thought apprehends both culture and nature and can "unmake the bed". Thought is part of nature just as surely as it apprehends it and is an isolatable from it, and looks down on it, I think.
- basman
September 13, 2010 at 6:29pm
When people say that Yiddish is a "dying language" they mean that it is dying as a literary language. Before the 1950s, it was one of the major literary languages of the world. Today... Also, can't a linguist be bothered to at least use YIVO transliteration standards?
- levitin
September 16, 2010 at 9:41am