A Further Word on John McWhorter

John McWhorter September 2, 2010 | 5:31 pm //TNR

LANGUAGE AS THOUGHT: WATCH OUT FOR THE HYPE

Judging from how the Times magazine’s excerpt from Guy Deutscher’s new book has been one of the most read pieces in the paper for over a week now, the book is on its way to libating readers ever eager for the seductive idea that people’s languages channel the way they think--that is, that grammar creates cultural outlooks.

“Oooh-mmmm!” I heard in a room once when a linguist parenthetically suggested that the reason speakers of one Native American language have prefixes instead of words to indicate mixing, poking, and sucking on food is because they are “culturally” attuned to such things.

But don’t we all cherish poking and sucking? As cool as it would be if grammar were thought, the idea is a myth--at least in any form that would be of interest beyond academic psychologists.

Deutscher is to be commended for noting that the original version of this idea has not held up. Fire-inspector-by-day Benjamin Lee Whorf claimed in the thirties that Hopi has no way to indicate tense, and thus created a cyclical sense of time among its speakers. But Hopi has plenty of words and suffixes to indicate tense, and the whole idea that Hopi was a substrate for a mystical frame of mind has fallen to pieces.

But Deutscher’s idea is that a new thread of work is showing that language does create thought patterns nevertheless. The upshot is supposed to be that human groups are going about with their grammatical structures lending them fascinatingly different Ways of Looking at the World.

Deutcher’s favorite evidence is peoples who sense direction not as a matter of front and back but as north, south, east and west. In their languages you say not “in front of me” but “west of me” and so on--meaning that where if we were turned around after saying something was in front of us we’d say that it was now in back of us, speakers of these languages would still say that it was west of them.

Neat. But are these people’s languages making them sensitive to direction rather than position--or is it, as almost anyone would intuit, that the culture focuses on direction and thus the language does? Americans have a plethora of terms referring to psychology--complex, affect, syndrome, superego, compensation. Yet who would say that it’s the English language that makes us sensitive to these things? It sounds like something a Martian anthropologist might come up with, too eager for the exotic to perceive--or settle for--the more mundane truth.

In the actual book, Deutscher attempts to flick away objections like this by noting that groups next door to direction-focused ones, culturally similar to their neighbors, often just refer to front and back like we do--and that this must mean that cultural differences of some kind drive the difference in grammar.

And that’s right--but it undercuts Deutscher’s initial argument. Sure, there are cultural differences--but the idea that the reason the direction-focused group thinks the way it does is because of their language puts the cart before the horse.

Nor does other evidence Deutscher shows indicate that grammar gives people “different ways of seeing the world” in the sense that most of us would find earth-shaking. Speakers of languages with gender are more likely to imagine--if asked on a survey, which typically they never are--feminine nouns talking with higher voices than masculine ones. So, your French friend, if you woke her up in the middle of the night, would be more likely to imagine a table--feminine la table-- talking like Meryl Streep than you would. OK--but is this “a way of looking at the world”? Does your friend think of tables as ladies? Ask her--she doesn’t.

Or--many languages have a word that covers both green and blue. Call it “grue.” Their speakers distinguish blue and green very slightly less quickly than English speakers do. Is this a “world view”? I can only quote my erstwhile UC Berkeley colleague Paul Kay with Willett Kempton here: “If the differences in world view are to be interesting, they must be sizeable. Minuscule differences are dull.”

Yet the coverage of the book will leave an implication that there are people thinking of boats as having to shave. This is to be resisted. One reason is that some languages have more grammar than others. Treat the north/south language as itself creating a “world view,” and then think about a more telegraphic language without endings and much of what makes grammars especially complicated, such as Chinese.

Some decades ago, a researcher floated the idea that in leaving the difference between “If you see” and “If you were to see” to context, Chinese renders its speakers less sensitive to the hypothetical than English speakers. I don’t even need to describe the response to that one--suffice it to say there wasn’t a hint of “Oooh-mmmm!”

Me:

I have some doubts about at least one part of McWhorter's reasoning.

Just to try to restate the lines of thought:

McWhorter argues that culture drives language.

Deutscher argues that language does create "thought patterns", that grammatical structures shapes the way language participants see the world.

Deutscher offers as prime evidence some languages using the language of position--front, back, etc.--and others using the language of directionality--North, East South, West.

To that McWhorter suggests, as a matter of intuition, rather than argues "that the culture focuses on direction and thus the language does." He then gives the example of a host of terms referring to psychology and rejects any suggestion that it's the English language as such that makes us aware of--"sensitive to"--the described phenomena.

McWhorter says that in Deutscher's book, Deutscher dismisses objections to his example and to culture driven rather than language driven arguments by noting that, according to McWhorter, culturally similar neighbors to the direction folks will often speak the language of position as we do in North America.

(This is where I really start to get bogged down.)

McWhorter says that Deutscher says of the example of these neighbors: "--and that this must mean that cultural differences of some kind drive the difference in grammar."

On reflection I don't follow that at all. As a matter of sheer logic, if one culturally similar neighbor uses direction and the other culturally similar neighbor uses position, then it must be differences in language driving the different use, not differences in culture. I'm assuming, though it's not stated, that each neighbor speaks a different language.

Then it seems to get worse:

"And that’s right--but it undercuts Deutscher’s initial argument. Sure, there are cultural differences--but the idea that the reason the direction-focused group thinks the way it does is because of their language puts the cart before the horse."

What's right: the seeming erroneous conclusion that cultural differences drive the difference between direction and position? I can see how the seeming erroneous conclusion undercuts Deutscher's original argument: the seeming erroneous conclusion is culture based; the orginal argument is language based. But I don't see, again, the warrant for the seeming erroneous conclusion.

And I don't see how McWhorter's argument is helped by him noting that North Americans speak of position just as do one of the culturally similar but far away neighbors. If anything the triad of speakers--two culturally similar, one culturally different, all speaking, presumably, different languages--add more in favor of a language drives culture argument rather than a culture drives language argument.

And, finally, I don't at all see, on the basis strictly of these supposed lines of reasoning, how McWhorter can assertively say--and I repeat-- "but the idea that the reason the direction-focused group thinks the way it does is because of their language puts the cart before the horse."

This I now conclude within the context of the above specific arguments is asserted rather than properly made out.

If someone can unpack this better than I have, and clarify, the soundness of McWhorter's arguments here, I'd be obliged.