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

Syntactic universals reveal that every language has a way of forming sentences such as:

Linguistics is an interesting subject.

I know that linguistics is an interesting subject.

You know that I know that linguistics is an interesting subject.

Cecelia knows that you know that I know that linguistics is an interesting subject.

Is it a fact that Cecelia knows that you know that I know that linguistics is an interesting subject?

Unfortunately, the textbook does not disclose the precise identity of the “syntactic universals” that have revealed that every language has such constructions. Nor does it specify when and where this revelation was handed down to mankind. But is the claim actually true? I have never had the privilege of communing with a syntactic universal myself, but the evidence from more mundane sources, namely descriptions of actual languages, leaves no doubt that some languages do not have a way of forming such sentences (and not just because they don’t have a word for “linguistics”). Many Australian aboriginal languages, for example, lack a construction equivalent to the finite complements of English, and so do some Indian languages of South America, including one, Matses, that we will meet in the next chapter. In such languages, one simply cannot form sentences such as:

It is a fact that many students don’t realize that their linguistics textbooks don’t know that some languages do not have finite complements.

Instead, this state of affairs would have to be expressed by other means. For example, in the early stages of Akkadian, one would do it along these lines:

Some languages do not have finite complements. Some linguistics textbooks don’t know that. Many students don’t realize their textbooks’ ignorance. This is a fact.

While systematic statistical surveys on subordination have not yet been conducted, impressionistically it seems that languages that have restricted use of complements (or even lack them altogether) are mostly spoken in simple societies. What is more, ancient languages such as Akkadian and Hittite show that this type of “syntactic technology” developed at a period when the societies in question were growing in complexity. Is this just coincidence?

I have argued elsewhere that it is not. Finite complements are a more effective tool for conveying elaborate propositions, especially when less information can be left to the context and more explicitness and accuracy are required. Recall the sequence of events described in the Akkadian legal document found here. Of course, it is possible to convey the set of propositions described there just as the Akkadian text organizes it, with a simple juxtaposition of clauses: X told Y to do something; Y did something different; X didn’t know that; X proved it in front of the inspectors. But when the dependence between the clauses is not explicitly marked, some ambiguity remains. What exactly did X prove? Did he prove that Y did something different from what he was told? Or did X prove that he didn’t know that Y did something different? The juxtaposition does not make that clear, but the hierarchical structure of finite complements can easily do so.

The language of legal proceedings, with its zealous insistence on accurate, explicit, and context-independent statements, is an extreme example of the type of elaborate communicative patterns that are more likely to arise in a complex society. But it is not the only example. As I mentioned earlier, in a large society of strangers there will be many more occasions where elaborate information has to be conveyed without reliance on shared background and knowledge. Finite complements are better equipped to convey such information than alternative constructions, so it is plausible that finite complements are more likely to emerge under the communicative pressures of a more complex society. Of course, as no statistical surveys about subordination have been conducted yet, speculations about correlations between subordination and the complexity of a society necessarily have to remain on an impressionistic level. But there are signs that things might be changing.

For decades, linguists have elevated the hollow slogan that “all languages are equally complex” to a fundamental tenet of their discipline, zealously suppressing as heresy any suggestion that the complexity of any areas of grammar could reflect aspects of society. As a consequence, relatively little work has been done on the subject. But a flurry of publications from the last couple of years shows that more linguists are now daring to explore such connections.

The results of this research have already revealed some significant statistical correlations. Some of these, such as the tendency of smaller societies to have more complex word structure, may seem surprising at first sight, but look plausible on closer examination. Other connections, such as the greater reliance on subordination in complex societies, still require detailed statistical surveys, but nevertheless seem intuitively convincing. And finally, the relation between the complexity of the sound system and the structure of society awaits a satisfactory explanation. But now that the taboo is lifting and more research is being done, there are undoubtedly more insights in store. So watch this space.

We have come a long way from the Aristotelian view of how nature and culture are reflected in language. Our starting point was that only the labels (or, as Aristotle called them, the “sounds of speech”) are cultural conventions, while everything behind those labels is a reflection of nature. By now culture has emerged as a considerable force whose influence extends far beyond merely bestowing labels on a preordained list of concepts and a preordained system of grammatical rules.

In the second part of the book, we move on to a question that may seem a fairly innocuous corollary to the conclusions of the first part: does our mother tongue influence the way we think? Since the conventions of the culture we were born into affect the way we carve up the world into concepts and the way we organize these concepts into elaborate ideas, it seems only natural to ask whether our culture can affect our thoughts through the linguistic idiosyncrasies it has imposed on us. But while raising the question appears harmless enough in theory, among serious researchers the subject has become a pariah. The following chapter explains why.

In 1924, Edward Sapir, the leading light of American linguistics, was entertaining no illusions about the attitude of outsiders toward his field: “The normal man of intelligence has something of a contempt for linguistic studies, convinced as he is that nothing can well be more useless. Such minor usefulness as he concedes to them is of a purely instrumental nature. French is worth studying because there are French books which are worth reading. Greek is worth studying-if it is-because a few plays and a few passages of verse, written in that curious and extinct vernacular, have still the power to disturb our hearts-if indeed they have. For the rest, there are excellent translations… But when Achilles has bewailed the death of his beloved Patroclus and Clytaemnestra has done her worst, what are we to do with the Greek aorists that are left on our hands? There is a traditional mode of procedure which arranges them into patterns. It is called grammar. The man who is in charge of grammar and is called a grammarian is regarded by all plain men as a frigid and dehumanized pedant.”

In Sapir’s own eyes, however, nothing could be further from the truth. What he and his colleagues were doing did not remotely resemble the pedantic sifting of subjunctives from aorists, moldy ablatives from rusty instrumentals. Linguists were making dramatic, even worldview-changing discoveries. A vast unexplored terrain was being opened up, the languages of the American Indians, and what was revealed there had the power to turn on its head millennia’s wisdom about the natural ways of organizing thoughts and ideas. For the Indians expressed themselves in unimaginably strange ways and thus demonstrated that many aspects of familiar languages, which had previously been assumed to be simply natural and universal, were in fact merely accidental traits of European tongues. The close study of Navajo, Nootka, Paiute, and a panorama of other native languages catapulted Sapir and his colleagues to vertiginous heights, from where they could now gaze down on the languages of the Old World like people who see their home patch from the air for the first time and suddenly recognize it as just one little spot in a vast and varied landscape. The experience was exhilarating. Sapir described it as the liberation from “what fetters the mind and benumbs the spirit… the dogged acceptance of absolutes.” And his student at Yale Benjamin Lee Whorf enthused: “We shall no longer be able to see a few recent dialects of the Indo-European family… as the apex of the evolution of the human mind. They, and our own thought processes with them, can no longer be envisioned as spanning the gamut of reason and knowledge but only as one constellation in a galactic expanse.”