The language problem

DO speakers of different languages think differently?

What comes to mind when we hear mamihlapinatapei which is apparently Yagan for "the wordless yet meaningful look shared by two people who desire to initiate something, but are both reluctant to start"? Can speakers of English, French or German conceive of viraha which means "realisation of love through separation?" Ever heard of the timeless Hopi, a Native American tribe of Arizona who didn't have any words for time, no grammatical constructions indicating the past or the future? 

How did they experience reality as we perceive it? The question leads us to linguistic relativity, popularly known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, named after Benjamin Lee Whorf, the US linguist and fire prevention engineer. Simply put, Whorf's hypothesis was that speakers of different kinds of language are, as a result of differences among language, cognitively different from one another. 

It sounds disturbing. The idea that people who speak some particular language are incapable of certain kinds of thought is distasteful. Japanese has a term that covers both green and blue. Russian has separate terms for dark and light blue. "Does this mean that Russians perceive these colours differently from Japanese people? Does language control and limit the way we think?" says Columbia linguist John McWhorter in his book The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language. Questions such as these have fascinated philosophers, anthropologists, linguists and psychologists for centuries touching on almost all the major controversies in the study of the mind. 

Despite all the fuss, however, the idea that language might shape thought was considered unprovable or simply wrong until recently. But research at Stanford and MIT, led by Lera Boroditsky, now an Associate Professor of Cognitive Science at UC San Diego, reveals interesting facts. Collecting data from China, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, and Aboriginal Australia, her team concluded that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how they see the world. "Appreciating its role in constructing our mental lives brings us one step closer to understanding the very nature of humanity," she said.

Even some of the rather minor aspects of language have profound impact on how we see the world. Take grammatical gender, for instance. In most Romance languages, nouns are either masculine or feminine. In many other languages, nouns are divided into more genders. Some Australian Aboriginal languages have as many as sixteen genders, among them, hunting tools, canines, shiny objects and  "women, fire, and dangerous things," a phrase made famous by US cognitive linguist George Lakoff. 

German and Spanish description of the world differs in a way predicted by grammatical gender. For example, to describe a "key" - which is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish - the German speakers are more likely to use words like "hard," "heavy," "metal," and "useful," whereas Spanish speakers tend to say "golden," "intricate," "lovely," and "tiny." 

In fact, we do not have to go far to test this concept; we can see it in an art gallery. More often than not, personification of abstract entities such as death, sin, victory, or time is determined by the grammatical gender of the word in the artist's native language. German painters are, therefore, more likely to paint death as a man while their Russian counterparts, as a woman. The fact that even quirks of grammar, such as grammatical gender, can affect how we think is mind-boggling.

Whether or not language shapes thought, or if it's the other way around, has gone in circles for centuries and is showing no sign of fatigue. Meanwhile, how the meaning of words like courage, acknowledgement and apology is changing in some places is just absurd.  

The writer is a member of the editorial team at The Daily Star.