Guy Deutscher - Through the Language Glass, Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

Culture: cultivation, the state of being cultivated, refinement, the result of cultivation, a type of civilization.

Chambers English dictionary

Kultur: Gesamtheit der geistigen und künstlerischen Errungen-schaften einer Gesellschaft.

(The totality of intellectual and artistic achievements of a society.)

Störig German dictionary

Culture: Ensemble des moyens mis en œuvre par l’homme pour augmenter ses connaissances, développer et améliorer les facultés de son esprit, notamment le jugement et le goût.

(The collection of means employed by man to increase his knowledge, develop and improve his mental faculties, notably judgment and taste.)

ATILF French dictionary

There is little, some would no doubt argue, that better confirms entrenched stereotypes about three great European cultures than the way they understand the concept of “culture” itself. Is the Chambers definition not the quintessence of Englishness? Rather amateurish in its noncommittal list of synonyms, politely avoiding any awkward definitions. And what could be more German than the German? Mercilessly thorough, overly intellectual, knocking the concept on the head with charmless precision. And as for the French: grandiloquent, hopelessly idealistic, and obsessed with le goût .

When anthropologists talk of “culture,” however, they use the word in a rather different sense from all of the definitions above, and in a far broader meaning. The scientific concept of “culture” emerged in Germany in the midnineteenth century but was first articulated explicitly by the English anthropologist Edward Tylor in 1871. Tylor started his seminal book, Primitive Culture , with the following definition, which is still quoted today in almost any introduction to the subject: “Taken in its wide ethnographic sense, [culture] is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” Culture is understood here as all human traits that are not the result of instinct-in other words, as a synonym for nurture as opposed to nature. Culture thus encompasses all aspects of our behavior that have evolved as social conventions and are transmitted through learning from generation to generation. Scientists sometimes even speak of “chimpanzee culture,” when certain groups of chimps use sticks and stones in a way that differs from that of neighboring groups and when this knowledge can be shown to have been transmitted through imitation rather than through the genes.

Human culture usually amounts to rather more than sticks and stones, of course. But the type of culture that will concern us in this book has little to do with high art, towering intellectual accomplishments, or impeccable refinement in manners and taste. The focus here will be on those everyday cultural traits that are impressed so deeply in our mind that we do not recognize them as such. In short, the aspects of culture that will be explored here are those where culture masquerades as human nature.

Is language one of these aspects? Is it an artifact of culture or a bequest of nature? If we hold language up as a mirror to the mind, what do we see reflected there: human nature or the cultural conventions of our society? This is the central question of the first part of the book.

On one level, even posing the question seems rather strange, because language is a cultural convention that doesn’t masquerade as anything but a cultural convention. Languages vary greatly across the globe, and everyone knows that the particular language a child happens to learn is just an accident of the particular culture she stumbled into. A Bostonian toddler will grow up speaking Bostonian English because she happened to be born in a Bostonian English environment, not because she has Bostonian genes. And a newborn resident of Beijing will eventually speak Mandarin Chinese because he grows up in a Mandarin environment, not because of any genetic predisposition. If you switch the babies, the Beijing boy will end up speaking perfect Bostonian English and the Bostonian girl will end up speaking perfect Mandarin. There are millions of walking proofs that attest to this fact.

What is more, the most obvious difference between languages is that they choose different names, or labels, for concepts. And as everyone knows, these labels lay no claims to being anything other than cultural conventions. Apart from some marginal cases of onomatopoeia, such as the cuckoo bird, where the label does try to reflect the nature of the bird it denotes, the vast majority of labels are arbitrary. A rose by any other name would smell as douce, γλνkó, édes, zoet, sladká, sød, ho, makea, magus, dolce, ng t, or even sweet. The labels are thus fairly and squarely within the remit of each culture and have almost nothing of nature in them.

But what happens when we try to peer further through the language glass, beyond the superficial level of the labels, at the concepts that lurk behind them? Are the concepts behind the English labels “rose” or “sweet” or “bird” or “cat” just as arbitrary as the labels themselves? Is the way our language carves up the world into concepts also merely a cultural convention? Or is it nature that has drawn for us the distinguishing boundary between “cat” and “dog” or “rose” and “bird”? If the question comes across as rather abstract, let’s put it to a practical test.

Imagine you are browsing in a forgotten corner of an old library and by chance you come across a musty eighteenth-century manuscript that seems never to have been opened since it was deposited there. It is entitled Adventures on the Remote Island of Zift , and it appears to relate in much detail a mysterious desert island that the author claims to have discovered. You leaf through it with trembling hands and start reading a chapter called “A Farther Account of the Ziftish Tongue Wherein Its Phantastick Phænomena Are Largely Describ’d”:

While we were at Dinner, I made bold to ask the Names of several things in their Language; and those noble Persons delighted to give me Answers. Although my principal Endeavour was to learn, yet the Difficulty was almost insuperable, the whole Compass of their Thoughts and Mind being shut up to such Distinctions as to us appear most natural. They have, for example, no Word in their Tongue by which our Idea of B i r d can be expressed, nor are there any Terms, wherein that Language can express the Notion of a R o s e. For in their stead, Ziftish employs one Word, B o s e, which signifies white Roses and all Birds save those with crimson Chests, and yet another Word, R i r d, which betokens Birds with crimson Chests and all Roses save white ones.

Waxing ever more loquacious after his third Glass of Liquor, my Host began to orate a Fable he recollected from his Childhood: how the Bose and the Rird met their woful End: “A bright plumed Rird and a mellifluous yellow Bose alighted on a high branch and fell a-twittering. They presently began to debate which of the twain sang the sweeter. Having failed in reaching a firm Conclusion, the Rird proposed that they should seek the Judgement of those Emblems of Beauty among the Flowers in the Garden below. Without more ado, they fluttered down to a fragrant Bose and a budding red Rird, and humbly begged their Opinion. The yellow Bose carolled with slender voice, and the Rird piped his quavering Air. Alas, neither the Bose nor the Rird could distinguish the Bose’s cascading Cadences from the tremulous Trills of the Rird. Great was the Indignation of the proud Warblers. The Rird, his Rage inflamed, fell upon the red Rird and plucked off her petals, and the yellow Bose, his Vanity sore wounded, attacked the Bose with equal vehemence. Forthwith both Arbitresses stood naked and stripp’d of their petals, the Bose no longer fragrant and the Rird no longer red.”