Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

FOURTEEN How Many Words Do We Have for Coffee?

The number of New Yorkers who can say “good morning” in any of the languages spoken by the Inuit peoples of the Arctic can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand. But in any small crowd of folk in the city or elsewhere you will surely find someone to tell you, “Eskimo has one hundred words for snow.” The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax was demolished many years ago,[91] but its place in popular wisdom about language and translation remains untouched. What are interesting for the study of translation are not so much the reasons this blooper is wrong but why people cling to it nonetheless.[92]

People who proffer the factoid seem to think it shows that the lexical resources of a language reflect the environment in which its native speakers live. As an observation about language in general, it’s a fair point to make—languages tend to have the words their users need and not to have words for things never used or encountered. But the Eskimo story actually says more than that. It tells us that a language and a culture are so closely bound together as to be one and the same thing. “Eskimo language” and “the [snowbound] world of the Eskimos” are mutually dependent things. That’s a very different proposition, and it lies at the heart of arguments about the translatability of different tongues.

The discovery and understanding of what makes different languages different and also the same has a curious modern history. In a lecture on the culture of the Hindus given in London to the Asiatic Society in 1786, an English judge posted to Bengal made a claim that overturned long-held beliefs in the superiority of the languages of the “civilized” West and the lesser jargons of the rest of the world:

This is generally reckoned to be the starter’s gun in a fascinating race that lasted for much of the nineteenth century to map all the world’s languages and to work out how they were related to one another, in “family trees” each springing from a single progenitor. But even on the Old Continent some languages—Albanian, for example—didn’t seem to have any close relatives at all, and one of them stuck out like a sore thumb. Basque, spoken in parts of northern Spain and southwestern France, was just so different as to resist any kind of “family” treatment. Wilhelm von Humboldt, elder brother of the great explorer Alexander, learned this strange idiom and wrote a grammar of it,[94] and in so doing developed the intellectual tools that in watered-down form ultimately led to the Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax.

Von Humboldt was struck not so much by the list of words that Basque has for different things as by the radically different structure of the language. It seemed to him that the grammar of Basque was the core and also the mirror of Basque culture. The observation was generalized into a theory: insofar as the formal properties of different languages are different from one another, each of the world’s languages gives access to a different mental world.[95] Basque cannot be “reduced” to French, German, or anything else. It is just itself—the embodiment and the root cause of “Basqueness.” Different languages, von Humboldt saw, were different worlds, and the great diversity of natural languages on the planet should be seen as a treasure house of tools for thinking in other ways.

The observation “other people just don’t think the way we do” was made long before von Humboldt’s essays appeared, but for most of human history it was dealt with quite easily. In Greek eyes, “barbarians” who couldn’t speak Greek were obviously not capable of saying anything interesting. Similarly, for the grammarians of seventeenth-century France, other languages could barely allow their speakers to engage in approximations to real thought, which was truly possible only in Latin and French. It must have taken great courage to express von Humboldt’s insight in the colonial era, when the otherness of other languages was generally thought to confirm the intellectual inferiority of people less fortunate than the French (or the Greeks, or the Romans, and so forth). Like Sir William Jones, the Bengal judge, von Humboldt dared to assert that other languages offered speakers of “West European” a wonderful mental resource.

Colonial expansion and conquest brought Europeans into contact with languages that were even more different than Basque. Some of them, dotted here and there around the globe in no obvious pattern, are very different indeed. Imagine a language in which there is no term for “left” or “right” but only expressions for laterality cast in terms of cardinal orientation. “There’s a fly on your southwest leg” might mean “left” or “right,” depending on which way the speaker and his interlocutor are facing. (This is less unfamiliar than it first sounds: in contemporary Manhattanese we use cardinal orientation whenever we say “go uptown from here.” To the dismay of many a lost tourist, that can’t be translated into tournez à gauche or à droite unless you also know which of the four cardinal points you are facing.) Speakers of Kuuk Thaayorre (Cape York, Australia), for example, lay out ordered sets (say, numbers from one to ten, or photographs of faces aged from babyhood to maturity) not from “left” to “right” or the other way around but starting from east—wherever east happens to be with respect to the table at which their anthropological linguist interrogator is seated.[96]

But languages can be even weirder than that. In Nootka, a language spoken on the Pacific coast of Canada, speakers characteristically mark some physical feature of the person addressed or spoken of either by means of suffixes or by inserting meaningless consonants in the body of a word. You can get a very faint idea of how this works from vulgar infixes such as “fan-bloody-tastic” in colloquial English. In Nootka, however, the physical classes indicated by these methods are children, unusually fat or heavy people, unusually short adults, those suffering from some defect of the eye, hunchbacks, those that are lame, left-handed persons, and circumcised males.[97]

One example of the radical difference of human languages was made famous by the American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf, who had learned and studied many Native American languages. In the language of the Hopi (but also in quite a few others, distributed with no obvious pattern around the globe), there is a grammatical category called evidentials. For each noun-phrase, the grammar of Hopi marks not so much the categories of definiteness or indefiniteness (“a farmer,” “the farmer”) but whether the thing or person referred to is within the field of vision of the speaker. “The farmer I can see” has a different form from “the farmer I saw yesterday,” which is different again from the form of “the farmer you told me about.” As a result, the English sentence “The farmer killed the duck” is quite untranslatable into Hopi without a heap of information the English sentence doesn’t give you—notably, whether the farmer in question is present to the speaker as he speaks and whether the duck is still lying around. If you speak Hopi, of course, and are speaking it to other Hopi speakers in an environment where the duck and the farmer are either with you or not, you know the answers to these questions and can express your meaning grammatically. What you can’t translate in a meaningful way is the sentence “The farmer killed the duck” out of context. But as we have seen in earlier chapters, this kind of untranslatability holds for any de-contextualized sentence in any language. The use of Hopi-type grammars as evidence of the untranslatability of tongues is really a red herring. Isolated, unsituated, written example sentences are often more hindrance than help when it comes to thinking about translation.

However, the rapid exploration of the diversity of human languages in the nineteenth century also led people to wonder in what ways the languages of less developed peoples were different from “civilized” tongues. Greek had “produced” a Plato, but Hopi had not. Was this because so-called primitive languages were not suited to higher thought? Or was it the lack of civilization itself that had kept primitive languages in their irrational and alien states? Von Humboldt’s hypothesis of an indissoluble bond between language and mentality could be used to argue either way around. Were there any general features of the languages of “natives” that marked them off as a class from those few languages that were spoken by the civilized nations of the world? And if so, what were they?

Explorer-linguists observed quite correctly that the languages of peoples living in what were for them exotic locales had lots of words for exotic things, and supplied subtle distinctions among many different kinds of animals, plants, tools, and ritual objects. The evidence piled up at a disproportionate rate simply because the explorers wanted to know first of all what all these strange objects in their new environment were called. Accounts of so-called primitive languages generally consisted of word lists elicited from interpreters or from sessions of pointing and asking for names.[98] But the languages of these remote cultures seemed deficient in words for “time,” “past,” “future,” “language,” “law,” “state,” “government,” “navy,” or “God.” Trique, a language spoken in Mexico, has no word for “miracle,” for example, only specific words for “heal the sick,” “part the waters,” and so forth.[99] Consequently, it was difficult to translate into such languages most of the things that colonial administrators and missionaries needed to say. How could these strange folk be granted the benefits of civilization if the languages they spoke did not allow for the expression of civilized things? More particularly, the difficulty of expressing “abstract thought” of the Western kind in many Native American and African languages suggested that the capacity for abstraction was the key to the progress of the human mind.

The “concrete languages” of the non-Western world were not just the reflection of the lower degree of civilization of the peoples who spoke them but the root cause of their backward state. By the dawn of the twentieth century, “too many concrete nouns” and “not enough abstractions” became the conventional qualities of “primitive” tongues.

That’s what people actually mean when they repeat the story about Eskimo words for snow. The multiplicity of concrete terms “in Eskimo” displays its speakers’ lack of the key feature of the civilized mind—the capacity to see things not as unique items but as tokens of a more general class. We can see that all kinds of snow—soft snow, wet snow, dry snow, poudreuse, melting snow, molten snow, slush, sleet, dirty gray snow, brown muddy snow, banks of snow heaped up by wind, snowbanks made by human hand, avalanches, and ski runs, to name but fourteen—are all instances of the same phenomenon, which we call “snow”; “Eskimos” see the varieties, not the class. (This isn’t true of real Inuit people, only of the Eskimos who figure in the Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax.)

Translation between “civilized” and “primitive” languages distinguished in this way was clearly impossible. The solution was to teach colonial subjects a form of language that would enable them to acquire civilization, and the obvious tool to carry out the mission civilisatrice was the language of the imperial administrators themselves. In some cases, as in the Spanish conquest of the Americas, the impoverished resources of native languages were seen as such a threat to the spread of civilization that the languages and their written records had to be eradicated. But the destruction of the Maya codices wasn’t solely an expression of naked power, religious fervor, and racism.[101] The suppression of lesser tongues was not a policy reserved by the Spanish for other continents—it was already the European norm. France had already begun its long campaign to stop people speaking anything that was not French within its own borders. Breton, Basque, Provençal, Alsatian, Picard, Gascon, and many other rural patois were almost hounded out of existence by laws and institutions over a period of several hundred years. The long pan-European drive toward “standard languages” was powered not only by political will, economic integration, urbanization, and other forces at play in the real world. It also expressed a deeply held belief that only some languages were suited to civilized thought.

What, then, can it mean to “think in Hopi”? If it means anything, can it be called “thought”? The linguist Edward Sapir came up with a revolutionary answer in the early part of the last century. Breaking with millennial practice and prejudice, he declared that all languages were equal. There is no hierarchy of tongues. Every variety of human language constitutes a system that is complete and entire, fully adequate to performing all the tasks that its users wish to make of it.

Sapir didn’t argue this case out of political correctness. He made his claims on the basis of long study of languages of many different kinds. The evidence itself brought him to see that any attempt to match the grammar of a language with the culture of its speakers or their ethnic origins was completely impossible. “Language,” “culture,” and “race” were independent variables. He turned the main part of von Humboldt’s legacy—European linguistic nationalism—upside down.

Sapir showed that there is nothing “simple” about the languages of “simple” societies—and nothing especially “complex” about the languages of economically advanced ones. In his writings on language he showed like no one before him just how immensely varied the forms of language are and how their distribution among societies of very different kinds corresponds to no overarching pattern. But he did not reject every part of the inheritance of von Humboldt’s study of Basque. Different languages, because they are structured in different ways, make their speakers pay attention to different aspects of the world. Having to mark presence or absence in languages that have evidentials (see here and here), or being obliged to mark time in languages of the Western European type, lays down what he called mind grooves—habitual patterns of thought. The question for translation (and for anthropology) is this: Can we jump the grooves and move more or less satisfactorily from one “habitual pattern” to another?

The view that you can’t ever really do this has become known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, despite the fact that Edward Sapir never subscribed to the idea. The trouble with the simple form of this misnamed prejudice—that translation is impossible between any two languages because each language constructs a radically different mental world—is that if it were true you would not be able to know it. The parable of the NASA captain’s report of an alien language, given here, is one way to show how flawed the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis really is. A more sophisticated version of the same line of thinking runs up against equally powerful blocks. If we grant that different languages provide different kinds of tools for thinking but allow for substantial overlaps—without which there could be no translation—we are left with the idea that there are just some things in, let us say, French that can never be expressed in English, and vice versa. There would then be an area of “thinking in French” that was “ineffable” in any other tongue. That contradicts the axiom of effability, which, as we argued in chapter 13, is the sine qua non for translation to exist. It makes no difference to the argument against it whether the ineffable is held to be an attribute of God or of poetry, or a property of French.

Sapir actually had much more interesting things to tell us about languages and the way they relate to social and especially intellectual life. Greek and Latin have served as the vehicles of sophisticated thinking that deals in abstract entities. Both have grammatical features that make it easy to create abstract nouns from verbs, adjectives, and other nouns. A strong trace of the grammatical facility for creating abstract entities in classical languages can be seen in those large parts of the English vocabulary that have Latin and Greek roots: humanhumanity, justjustice, civilcivility, translatetranslation, calculus calculatecalculation, and so forth. Sapir’s point was that instead of saying that Latin and Greek are well suited to abstract thought, we should say, rather, that abstract thought is well suited to Greek and Latin and view the particular kinds of philosophical discourse that were developed by their speakers as a consequence of the grammar they used. The mind grooves laid down by the forms of a language are not prison walls but the hills and valleys of a mental landscape where some paths are easier to follow than others. If Plato had had Hopi to think with, he would not have come up with Platonic philosophy, that’s for sure—and that’s probably not a merely retrospective illusion based on the observable fact that there’s no Hopi speaker who thinks he is Plato. Hopi thinkers think something else. That does not make Hopi a primitive language unsuited to true thought. It means that speakers of what Sapir called “Average West European” are poorly equipped to engage in Hopi thought. To expand our minds and to become more fully civilized members of the human race, we should learn as many different languages as we can. The diversity of tongues is a treasure and a resource for thinking new thoughts.

If you go into a Starbucks and ask for “coffee,” the barista most likely will give you a blank stare. To him the word means absolutely nothing. There are at least thirty-seven words for coffee in my local dialect of Coffeeshop Talk (or tok-kofi, as it would be called if I lived in Papua New Guinea). Unless you use one of these individuated terms, your utterance will seem baffling or produce an unwanted result. You should point this out next time anyone tells you that Eskimo has a hundred words for snow. If a Martian explorer should visit your local bar and deduce from the lingo that Average West Europeans lack a single word to designate the type that covers all tokens of small quantities of a hot or cold black or brown liquid in a disposable cup, and consequently pour scorn on your language as inappropriate to higher forms of interplanetary thought—well, now you can tell him where to get off.