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

And as it so happens, the Guugu Yimithirr have exactly this kind of an infallible compass. They maintain their orientation with respect to the fixed cardinal directions at all times. Regardless of visibility conditions, regardless of whether they are in thick forest or on an open plain, whether outside or indoors, whether stationary or moving, they have a spot-on sense of direction. Stephen Levinson relates how he took Guugu Yimithirr speakers on various trips to unfamiliar places, both walking and driving, and then tested their orientation. In their region, it is rarely possible to travel in a straight line, since the route often has to go around bogs, mangrove swamps, rivers, mountains, sand dunes, forests, and, if on foot, snake-infested grassland. But even so, and even when they were taken to dense forests with no visibility, even inside caves, they always, without any hesitation, could point accurately to the cardinal directions. They don’t do any conscious computations: they don’t look at the sun and pause for a moment of calculation before saying “the ant is north of your foot.” They seem to have perfect pitch for directions. They simply feel where north, south, west, and east are, just as people with perfect pitch hear what each note is without having to calculate intervals.

Similar stories are told about Tzeltal speakers. Levinson relates how one speaker was blindfolded and spun around over twenty times in a darkened house. Still blindfolded and dizzy, he pointed without problem at the direction of “true downhill.” A woman was taken into the market town for medical treatment. She had rarely if ever been in that town before, and certainly never in the house where she was staying. In the room, the woman spotted an unfamiliar contraption, a sink, and asked her husband: “Is the hot water in the uphill tap?”

The Guugu Yimithirr take this sense of direction entirely for granted and consider it a matter of course. They cannot explain how they know the cardinal directions, just as you cannot explain how you know where in front of you is and where left and right are. One thing that can be ascertained, however, is that the most obvious candidate, namely the position of the sun, is not the only factor they rely on. Several people reported that when they traveled by plane to very distant places such as Melbourne, more than a three-hour flight away, they experienced the strange sensation that the sun did not rise in the east. One person even insisted that he had been to a place where the sun really did not rise in the east. This means that the Guugu Yimithirr’s orientation does fail them when they are displaced to an entirely different geographic region. But more importantly, it shows that in their own environment they rely on cues other than the position of the sun, and that these cues can even take precedence. When Levinson asked some informants if they could think of clues that would help him improve his sense of direction, they volunteered such hints as the differences in brightness of the sides of trunks of particular trees, the orientation of termite mounds, wind directions in particular seasons, the flights of bats and migrating birds, the alignment of sand dunes in the coastal area.

But we are only just beginning, because the sense of orientation that is required to speak a Guugu Yimithirr-style language has to extend further than the immediate present. What about relating past experiences, for instance? Suppose I ask you to describe a picture you saw in a museum a long time ago. You would probably describe what you see in your mind’s eye, say the milkmaid pouring the milk into a bowl on a table, the light coming from the window on the left and illuminating the wall behind her, and so on. Or suppose you are trying to remember a dramatic event from many years ago, when you capsized a sailing boat off the Great Barrier Reef. You jumped out to the right just before the boat rolled over to the left, and as you were swimming away you saw a shark in front of you, but… if you lived to tell the tale, you would probably describe it more or less as I just did now, by relaying everything from the vantage point of your orientation at the time: jumping “to the right” of the boat, the shark “in front of you.” What you will probably not remember is whether the shark was exactly to the north of you swimming south or to the west swimming east. After all, when there is a shark right in front of you, one of the last things you worry about is the cardinal directions. Similarly, even if at the time you visited the museum you could have worked out the orientation of the room in which the picture was hanging, it is extremely unlikely that you will remember now if the window in the picture was to the north or the east of the girl. What you will see in your mind’s eye is the picture as it appeared when you stood in front of it, that’s all.

But if you speak a Guugu Yimithirr-style language, that sort of memory will simply not do. You cannot say “the window to the left of the girl” so you’ll have to remember if the window was north of her or east or south or west. In the same way, you cannot say “the shark in front of me.” If you want to describe the scene, you’d have to specify, even twenty years later, in which cardinal direction the shark was. So your memories of anything that you might ever want to report will have to be stored in your brain with cardinal directions as part of the picture.

Does this sound far-fetched? John Haviland filmed a Guugu Yimithirr speaker, Jack Bambi, telling his old friends the story of how in his youth he capsized in shark-infested waters but managed to swim safely ashore. Jack and another person were on a trip with a mission boat, delivering clothing and provisions to an outstation on the McIvor River. They were caught in a storm, and their boat capsized in a whirlpool. They both jumped into the water and managed to swim nearly three miles to the shore, only to discover, on returning to the mission, that Mr. Schwarz was far more concerned at the loss of the boat than relieved at their miraculous escape. Except for its content, the remarkable thing about the story is that it was remembered throughout in cardinal directions: Jack Bambi jumped into the water on the western side of the boat, his companion to the east of the boat, they saw a giant shark swimming north, and so on.

Perhaps the cardinal directions were just made up for the occasion? Well, quite by chance, Stephen Levinson filmed the same person two years later, telling the same story. The cardinal directions matched exactly in the two tellings. Even more remarkable were the hand gestures that accompanied Jack’s story. In the first film, shot in 1980, Jack is facing west. When he tells how the boat flipped over, he rolls his hands forward away from his body. In 1982, he is sitting facing north. Now, when he gets to the climactic point when the boat flips over, he makes a rolling movement from his right to his left. Only this way of representing the hand movements is all wrong. Jack was not rolling his hands from right to left at all. On both occasions, he was simply rolling his hands from east to west! He maintained the correct geographic direction of the boat’s movement, without even giving it a moment’s thought. And as it happens, at the time of year when the accident happened there are strong southeasterly winds in the area, so flipping from east to west seems very likely.

Levinson also relates how a group of Hopevale men once had to drive to Cairns, the nearest city, some 150 miles to the south, to discuss land-rights issues with other aboriginal groups. The meeting was in a room without windows, in a building reached either by a back alley or through a car park, so that the relation between the building and the city layout was somewhat obscured. About a month later, back in Hopevale, he asked a few of the participants about the orientation of the meeting room and the positions of the speakers at the meeting. He got accurate responses, and complete agreement, about the orientation in cardinal directions of the main speaker, the blackboard, and other objects in the room.