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

Wilhelm von Humboldt, 1767-1835

His linguistic road to Damascus led through the Pyrenees. In 1799, he traveled to Spain and was greatly taken with the Basque people, their culture, and their landscape. But above all, it was their language that aroused his curiosity. Here was a language spoken on European soil but entirely unlike all other European tongues and clearly from a different stock. Back from the journey, Humboldt spent months reading through everything he could find about the Basques, but as there wasn’t very much in the way of reliable information, he returned to the Pyrenees to do serious fieldwork and learn the language firsthand. As his knowledge deepened, he realized the extent to which the structure of this language-rather than merely its vocabulary-diverged from everything else he knew and from what he had previously taken as the only natural form of grammar. The revelation gradually dawned on him that not all languages were made in the image of Latin.

Once Humboldt’s curiosity was aroused, he tried to find descriptions of even more remote tongues. There was almost nothing published at the time, but the opportunity to discover more presented itself when he became the Prussian envoy to the Vatican in 1802. Rome was teeming with Jesuit missionaries who had been expelled from their missions in Spanish South America, and the Vatican library contained many manuscripts with descriptions of South and Central American languages that these missionaries had brought with them or written once back in Rome. Humboldt trawled through such grammars, and with his eyes now wide open after his experience with Basque, he could make out how distorted a picture they presented: structures that deviated from the European type had either passed unnoticed or been coerced to fit the European mold. “It is sad to see,” he wrote, “what violence these missionaries exerted both on themselves and on the languages, in order to force them into the narrow rules of Latin grammar.” In his determination to understand how the American languages actually worked, Humboldt completely rewrote many of these grammars, and gradually the real structure of the languages emerged from behind the facade of Latin paradigms.

Humboldt set linguists on a steep learning curve. Of course, the secondhand information that he was able to glean about American Indian languages was nothing like the deep firsthand knowledge that Sapir developed a century later. And considering what we know today about how the grammars of different languages are organized, Humboldt was barely scratching the surface. But the dim ray of light that shone from his materials felt dazzling nonetheless because of the utter darkness in which he and his contemporaries had languished.

For Humboldt, the elation of breaking new ground was mixed with frustration at the need to impress the value of his discoveries upon an uncomprehending world, which persisted in regarding the study of primitive tongues as an activity fit only for butterfly collectors. Humboldt went to great lengths to explain why the profound dissimilarities among grammars were in fact a window into far greater things. “The difference between languages,” he argued, “is not only in sounds and signs but in worldview. Herein is found the reason and ultimate goal of all the study of language.” But this was not all. Humboldt also claimed that grammatical differences not only reflect preexisting differences in thought but are responsible for shaping these differences in the first place. The mother tongue “is not just the means for representing a truth already recognized but much more to discover the truth that had not been recognized previously.” Since “language is the forming organ of thought,” there must be an intimate relation between the laws of grammar and the laws of thinking. “Thinking,” he concluded, “is dependent not just on language in general but to a certain extent on each individual language.”

A seductive idea was thus tossed into the air, an idea that in the 1930s would be taken up (and up and up) at Yale. Humboldt himself never went as far as alleging that our mother tongue can entirely constrain our thoughts and intellectual horizons. He explicitly acknowledged something that in the hullaballoo around Whorf a century later tended to be overlooked, namely that, in principle, any thought can be expressed in any language. The real differences between languages, he argued, are not in what a language is able to express but rather in “what it encourages and stimulates its speakers to do from its own inner force.”

What exactly this “inner force” is, what ideas precisely it “stimulates” speakers to formulate, and how in practical terms it might do so always remained rather elusive in Humboldt’s writings. As we’ll see, his basic intuition may have been sound, but despite the detailed knowledge that he amassed about many exotic languages, his statements on the subject of the mother tongue’s influence on the mind always remained in the higher stratosphere of philosophical generalities and never really got down to the nitty-gritty of detail.

In fact, in his voluminous musings on this subject, Humboldt abided by the first two commandments for any great thinker: (1) Thou shalt be vague, (2) Thou shalt not eschew self-contradiction. But it may have been exactly this vagueness that struck a chord with his contemporaries. Following Humboldt’s lead, it now became fashionable among the great and the good to pay tribute to language’s influence on thought, and as long as one didn’t feel the urge to provide any particular examples, one could freely indulge in resonant but ultimately hollow imagery. The renowned Oxford professor of philology Max Müller declared in 1873 that “the words in which we think are channels of thought which we have not dug ourselves, but which we found ready made for us.” And his nemesis across the Atlantic, the American linguist William Whitney, may have concurred with Müller in nothing else but agreed nevertheless that “every single language has its own peculiar framework of established distinctions, its shapes and forms of thought, into which, for the human being who learns that language as his mother-tongue, is cast the content and product of his mind, his store of impressions,… his experience and knowledge of the world.” The mathematician and philosopher William Kingdon Clifford added a few years later that “it is the thought of past humanity imbedded in our language which makes Nature to be what she is for us.”

Throughout the nineteenth century, however, such statements remained on the level of occasional rhetorical flourishes. It was only in the twentieth century that the slogans began to be distilled into specific claims about the alleged influence of particular grammatical phenomena on the mind. The Humboldtian ideas now underwent a rapid process of fermentation, and as the spirit of the new theory grew more powerful, the rhetoric became less sober.

What was it in the air that catalyzed this reaction? One reason must have been the great (and wholly justified) excitement about the enormous advances that linguists were making in understanding the outlandish nature of Amerindian languages. Linguists in America did not need to pore over manuscripts from the Vatican library to unearth the structure of the native languages of the continent, as there were still dozens of living native languages to be studied in situ. What is more, in the century that separated Sapir from Humboldt, the science of language had experienced a meteoric rise in sophistication, and the analytic tools at linguists’ disposal became incomparably more powerful. When these advanced tools began to be applied in earnest to the treasure hoard of Native American languages, they revealed grammatical landscapes that Humboldt could not have dreamed of.