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

Suppose you want to give someone driving directions for getting to your house. You might say something like: “Just after the traffic lights, take the first left and continue until you see the supermarket on your left, then turn right and drive to the end of the road, where you’ll see a white house right in front of you. Our door is the one on the right.” You could, in theory, also say the following: “Just to the east of the traffic lights, drive north and continue until you see a supermarket in the west. Then drive east, and at the end of the road you’ll see a white house directly to the east. Ours is the southern door.” These two sets of directions are equivalent in the sense that they describe the same route, but they rely on different systems of coordinates. The first system uses egocentric coordinates, whose two axes depend on our own body: a left-right axis and a front-back axis orthogonal to it. This coordinate system moves around with us wherever we turn. The axes always shift together with our field of vision, so that what is in the front becomes behind if we turn around, what was on our right is now on the left. The second system of coordinates uses fixed geographic directions, which are based on the compass directions North, South, East, and West. These directions do not change with your movements-what is to your north remains exactly to your north no matter how often you twist and turn.

Of course, the egocentric and geographic systems do not exhaust the possibilities of talking about space and giving spatial directions. One could, for example, just point at a particular direction and say “go that way.” But for simplicity, let’s concentrate on the differences between the egocentric and the geographic systems. Each system of coordinates has advantages and disadvantages, and in practice we use both in our daily lives, depending on their appropriateness to the context. It would be most natural to use cardinal directions when giving instructions for hiking in the open countryside, for example, or more generally for talking about large-scale orientation. “Oregon is north of California” is more natural than “Oregon is to the right of California if you’re facing the sea.” Even inside some cities, especially those with clear geographic axes, people use fixed geographic concepts such as “uptown” or “downtown.” But on the whole, when giving driving or walking directions in town, it is far more usual to use the egocentric coordinates: “turn left, then take the third right,” and so on. The egocentric coordinates are even more dominant when we describe small-scale spaces, especially inside buildings. The geographic directions may not be entirely absent (real estate agents may wax lyrical about south-facing living rooms, for instance), but this usage is at best marginal. Just think how ridiculous it would be to say “When you get out of the elevator, walk south and then take the second door to the east.” When Pooh gets wedged in Rabbit’s front doorway and is forced to remain there for a whole week to reduce his girth, A. A. Milne refers to the “North end” and “the South end” of Pooh and thereby highlights the desperate fixity of his predicament. But think how absurd it would be for an aerobic trainer or a ballet teacher to say “now raise your north hand and move your south leg eastward.”

Why does the egocentric system feel so much easier and more natural to handle? Simply because we always know where “in front of” us is and where “behind” and “left” and “right” are. We don’t need a map or a compass to work this out, we don’t need to look at the sun or the North Star, we just feel it, because the egocentric system of coordinates is based directly on our own body and our immediate visual field. The front-back axis cuts right between our two eyes: it is a long imaginary line that extends straight from our nose into the distance and which turns with our nose and eyes wherever and whenever they turn. And likewise, the left-right axis, which cuts through our shoulders, always obligingly adapts itself to our own orientation.

The system of geographic coordinates, on the other hand, is based on external concepts that do not adapt themselves to our own orientation and that need to be computed (or remembered) from the position of the sun or the stars or from features of the landscape. So on the whole, we revert to the geographic coordinates only when we really need to do so: if the egocentric system is not up for the task or if the geographic directions are specifically relevant (for instance, in evaluating the merits of south-facing rooms).

Indeed, philosophers and psychologists from Kant onwards have argued that all spatial thinking is essentially egocentric in nature and that our primary notions of space are derived from the planes that go through our bodies. One of the trump arguments for the primacy of the egocentric coordinates was of course human language. The universal reliance of languages on the egocentric coordinates, and the privileged position that all languages accord the egocentric coordinates over all other systems, was said to parade before us the universal features of the human mind.

But then came Guugu Yimithirr. And then came the astounding realization that those naked Aborigines who two centuries ago gave the kangaroo to the world had never heard of Immanuel Kant. Or at least they had never read his famous 1768 paper on the primacy of the egocentric conception of space to language and mind. Or at the very least, if they had read it, they never got round to applying Kant’s analysis to their language. As it turns out, their language does not make any use of egocentric coordinates at all!

In retrospect, it seems almost a miracle that when John Haviland started researching Guugu Yimithirr in the 1970s, he could still find anyone who spoke the language at all. For the Aborigines’ brush with civilization was not entirely conducive to the conservation of their language.

After Captain Cook departed in 1770, the Guugu Yimithirr were at first spared intense contact with Europeans, and for a whole century were largely left to their own devices. But when the forces of progress eventually did arrive, they came with lightning speed. Gold was discovered in the area in 1873, not far from the spot where Cook’s Endeavour had once moored, and a town named after Cook was founded-quite literally-overnight. One Friday in October 1873, a ship full of prospectors sailed into a silent, lonely, distant river mouth. And on the Saturday, as one of the travelers later described, “we were in the middle of a young diggings township-men hurrying to and fro, tents rising in all directions, the shouts of sailors and labourers landing more horses and cargo, combined with the rattling of the donkey-engine, cranes and chains.” Following in the footsteps of the diggers, farmers started taking up properties along the Endeavour River. The prospectors needed land for mining, and the farmers needed the land and the water holes for their cattle. In the new order, there was not much space left for the Guugu Yimithirr. The farmers resented their burning of grass and chasing the cattle away from the water holes, so the police were employed to remove the natives from the settlers’ land. The Aborigines reacted with a certain degree of antagonism, and this in turn provoked the settlers to a policy of extermination. Less than a year after Cooktown was founded, the Cooktown Herald explained in an editorial that “when savages are pitted against civilisation, they must go to the wall; it is the fate of their race. Much as we may deplore the necessity for such a state of things, it is absolutely necessary, in order that the onward march of civilisation may not be arrested by the antagonism of the aboriginals.” The threats were not empty, for the ideology was carried out through a policy of “dispersion,” which meant shooting aboriginal camps out of existence. Those natives who had not been “dispersed” either retreated in isolated bands into the bush or were drawn to the town, where they were reduced to drink and prostitution.