Language Shapes Reality
UU Fellowship of Midland, MI
August 28, 2005
Jane Thickstun

Reading
The reading is from an article called "Lineal and Nonlineal Codifications of Reality" by Dorothy Lee.

The student of ethnography often has to deal with words which punctuate reality into different phrasings from the ones with which he [or she] is familiar. Let us take, for instance, the words for "brother" and "sister." We go to the islands of Ontong Java to study the kinship system. We ask our informant what he calls his sister and he says ave; he calls his brother kainga. So we equate ave with "sister" and kainga with "brother." By way of checking our information we ask the sister what she calls her brother; it turns out that for her, ave is "brother," not "sister" as we were led to expect; and that it is her sister whom she calls kainga. The same reality, the same actual kinship is present there as with us; but we have chosen a different aspect for naming. We are prepared to account for this; we say that both cultures name according to what we would call a certain type of blood relationship; but whereas we make reference to absolute sex, they refer to relative sex. Further inquiry, however, discloses that in this, also, we are wrong. Because in our own culture we name relatives according to formal definition and biologic relationship, we have thought that this formulation represents reality; and we have tried to understand the Ontong Javanese relationship terms according to these distinctions which, we believe, are given in nature. But the Ontong Javanese classifies relatives according to a different aspect of reality, differently punctuated. And because of this, he applies kainga as well to a wife's sister and a husband's brother; to a man's brother's wife and a woman's sister's husband, as well as to a number of other individuals. Neither sex nor blood relationship, then, can be basic to this term. The Ontong Javanese name according to their everyday behavior and experience, not according to formal definition. A man shares the ordinary details of his living with his brothers and their wives for a large part of the year; he sleeps in the same large room, he eats with them; he jokes and works around the house with them; the rest of the year he spends with his wife's sisters and their husbands, in the same easy companionship. All these individuals are kainga to one another. The ave, on the other hand, names a behavior of great strain and propriety; it is based originally upon the relative sex of siblings, yes, but it does not signify biological fact. It names a social relationship, a behavior, an emotional tone. Ave can never spend their adult life together, except on rare and temporary occasions. They can never be under the same roof alone together, cannot chat at ease together, cannot refer even distantly to sex in the presence of each other, not even to one's own sweetheart or spouse; more than that, everyone else must be circumspect when the ave of someone of the group is present. The ave relationship also carries special obligations toward a female ave and her children. Kainga means a relationship of ease, full of shared living, of informality, gaiety; ave names one of formality, prohibition, strain. These two cultures, theirs and our own, have phrased and formulated social reality in completely different ways, and have given their formulation different names.

Sermon

A couple of years ago, I did a sermon on linguistics, which was my undergraduate major. In that sermon, I talked about language change and how linguists look at language, and at the end I touched on the topic of the relation of language to thought. I decided to do a little more with this topic, since there seems to be some interest in it here, and it has always been of great interest to me.

This question of the relation of language to thought is what led me into the study of linguistics in the first place. It goes back to high school, when I took German as my foreign language. At some point I wasn't just translating English words anymore, but felt like I had gotten inside the other language and was able to see the world from a new and different perspective.

The different ways that German expressed things opened up for me new ways of seeing the world. And German is, of all languages, one of the closest to English that there is. It is a sister language to English on the family tree; there are plenty of more exotic, more different languages that could offer an even more different worldview. And yet I experienced this with German.

How did I see this other worldview? In grammatical structures, a turn of the phrase, vocabulary items. For instance, in my old high school German textbook, the German word for a TV set is "Fernsehapparat": literally, "far-seeing apparatus"! Of course our English word television means "far-seeing" as well, but since we say it in Latin, that meaning usually eludes us. It makes me wonder if the fact that we're seeing far away is something Germans are more aware of with their Fernsehapparate than we are with our TV sets. It certainly made me more aware.

There are plenty of examples like that, where German puts together other German words to convey new concepts, making the meaning plain, while English, a Germanic language, often uses Latin words, making it harder for us to see the connection, unless we study Latin or a language descended from Latin. So, for instance, our word "hospital" in German is "Krankenhaus," literally "sick house," and "nurse" is "Krankenschwester," or literally, "sick sister." I always liked that one.

Language works by metaphor, though the metaphorical nature is often disguised or forgotten. I think what my study of German did for me was to lay bare some of the metaphors that exist in that language, metaphors that are sometimes different from the metaphors employed by English. I don't see the metaphors inherent in my own language, because it's so internalized. But I saw them in the German language, and it captured my imagination.

I thought if I could have my worldview expanded by learning another language, just think how rich my perspective would be if I learned many languages!

I went off to college knowing I wanted to do something with language, but not having even heard of the science of linguistics. So I started by taking classes in many languages. In addition to German, I took Russian and, in my second year, Quechua, the language spoken by the descendants of the Incas in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, because I wanted to study a non-Indo-European language. Indo-European is the big language family that includes most of the languages spoken in Europe – all the Germanic languages, the Romance languages, the Slavic languages – as well as Sanskrit, the ancient language of India.

I gradually became aware of the field of linguistics, and it was clear that this was the place to pursue my interest. I soon became acquainted with the theory of linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, after the linguists who made it famous. Benjamin Lee Whorf was an amateur linguist– by day he was an insurance claims adjustor. He studied with the anthropological linguist, Edward Sapir. They both studied Native American languages, and were struck by the differences between those languages and the European languages they were familiar with.

The theory of linguistic relativity is best expressed in their words.

In a 1929 paper, Sapir says:

"Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone 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. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection." (1929, p. 209).

Whorf expresses a similar view. He says:

"We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds--and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds." (Whorf, 1956, p. 213).

He also says:

"We cut up and organize the spread and flow of events as we do, largely because, through our mother tongue, we are parties to an agreement to do so, not because nature itself is segmented in exactly that way for all to see. Languages differ not only in how they build their sentences but also in how they break down nature to secure the elements to put in those sentences." (Whorf, 1956, p. 240)

Elsewhere he says,

"Concepts of ‘time' and ‘matter' are not given in substantially the same form by experience to all [people] but depend on the nature of the language or languages through the use of which they have developed." (Greenberg, p. 80)

Scholars have identified two formulations of the theory: the softer version, often called linguistic relativity, that simply says language influences thought; and the more radical version, called linguistic determinism, that says language actually determines thought. Everyone agrees to the theory at its most trivial level, but many disagree with its strongest formulations. There is a feeling that if our thought were determined so strongly by the language we speak, it would be nearly impossible to translate, impossible to communicate at all between people who speak different languages. Whorf emphasizes, however, that the influence of language determines our habitual ways of thinking, but it would not make it impossible to think in new ways, or to express new or different ways of thinking.

Critics of the theory of linguistic relativity claim there is no evidence for the different worldviews that different languages contain. Scientists have a hard time with the fact that the effect of language on our thought is such a hard thing to prove or disprove. Some see Whorf's logic as circular, using the data of the language to prove the existence of a different world view embedded in that language.

Scholars have attempted to avoid this circularity by relating the linguistic categories to evidence that is independent of language. Many studies have focused on color terms and the way we break up the color spectrum differently depending on the language we speak. One landmark study concluded that "across languages, the division of the color spectrum . . . is far from arbitrary. A few recurrent boundaries define the color terms of all languages. . . . they also discovered that there is a further and remarkable restraint on the possible number of color terminologies. For example, even languages with the simplest color systems of all, i.e., those with two basic color words, always have the same essential division – that between "black," embracing all the darker colors, and "white," embracing all the light ones – and with close to identical boundaries in all cases. In less simple color systems, if a third color is added, it is always red; a fourth color is always yellow or green; and if there are five colors, they are always black, white, red, yellow, and green, and so on. The number of color systems is therefore remarkably small in relation to the infinite possibilities afforded by purely arbitrary division." (Greenberg, p. 82-83) Many feel this discredits the stronger formulation of the theory.

Another area that has been the focus of a lot of research is kinship terms. We had an example in the reading of a way that speakers of another language talk about their relatives in totally different ways than we do. Not just the names, but the categories they recognize as relevant are far different. They aren't based on sex or blood relationship, as our words "brother" and "sister" are. Indeed, they have no concept of brother and sister as we do, just as we have no concepts that correspond to their ave and kainga. That doesn't mean we aren't capable of understanding each other's concepts; on the contrary, it is precisely in understanding them that we enlarge our view of the world and its possibilities.

Whorf finds many examples of a different worldview embodied in a different language in his work on the Hopi language. He contrasts it with English and other European languages. He says: "We are constantly reading into nature fictional acting entities, simply because our verbs must have substantives in front of them. We have to say ‘it flashed' or ‘a light flashed,' setting up an actor, ‘it' or ‘light,' to perform what we call an action, "to flash." Yet the flashing and the light are one and the same! The Hopi language reports the flash with a simple verb, rehpi: ‘flash (occurred).'" (Whorf, 1956, p. 243)

Hopi can and does have verbs without subjects. Whorf suggests that because of this, Hopi may be better suited than our western, Indo-European languages for understanding some aspects of the universe. In particular, he seems to think it might be far better suited to investigate and describe the subatomic realm of quantum physics.

I think my fascination with the question is similar to my fascination with personality typing systems: it helps me to see the ways my own perspective is limited. It shows me that I don't have the whole picture, and that there are immense possibilities beyond my limited conception, beyond my limited perception.

The realization of my limitation is humbling, but hardly something to get me down, because it is at the same time exciting to realize the vast potential, the perhaps infinite possibilities open to me as a human being to understand the world, the universe, reality.

In understanding something of how other people see the world, whether by learning a new language, or by listening to the experience of others who are different from us, we can transcend our limitations and gain a broader, deeper worldview.

It is precisely in recognizing our limitations that we become able to transcend them. If we think that the way we see the world is the only way to see it, then we can't be open to seeing the world differently. In that case, we are limiting ourselves.

There are many ways we human beings are limited – by our bodies, which can only hear and see within a certain range of possibilities, for instance; by our location on the planet; by our being born to a certain time; by our being raised in a certain family with all its quirks and oddities that we take to be the norm, at least, perhaps, until we grow up. To have only one mother tongue, one first language, is another limitation most of us have, and the language we speak is yet another influence that shapes our view of reality.

Ultimately, reality encompasses much that can't be expressed, or expressed well, in any language. Sometimes the best way to transcend the limitations of language is through silence.

Let us become ever more aware of the assumptions, the particular worldview, embedded in our language, and let us become ever more aware of other possibilities, so that our view of reality can keep on expanding.

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