Is it possible to think without knowing a form of language?

Academic Year 2011 - 2012 Jan 20 Supervisor Frank Cartledge Course Fashion Journalism Student Number 0903980

Language is more powerful than we think, but can we think without language?

By Dima Markova

For Alma

CONTENTS PAGE

INTRODUCTION

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CHAPTER ONE

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CHAPTER TWO

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WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT EDWARD SAPIR BENJAMIN LEE WHORF THE INDEPENDENCE OF LINGUISTICS AND NOAM CHOMSKY

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CHAPTER THREE

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THE BOAS-JACOBSON PRINCIPLE THE LANGUAGE OF SPATIAL DIRECTION

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CONCLUSION

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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INTRODUCTION Language is more powerful than we think, but can we think without a language? Throughout time numerous celebrated philosophers and linguists have explored the relation of language to the thought of its speakers, and the debate still continues today.

To what extent does language influence thought?

Language plays two leading roles in the life of mankind. The first one is its public role, in which language becomes a system of conversations agreed upon by a speech community, used for the sole purpose of effective contact and interaction. The second one is its private role, in which language guides our inner-conversations, unarguably using the same structure and characteristics as in its public act. It is because of this correspondence between the roles language plays that one can understand how linguistic conventions mirror what goes on in the most mystic and powerful part of our being, the mind. (Deutscher, 2010) Language is not only the bridge used between one’s consciousness and the outside world, it is what makes an individual a part of his society. It is important to define ‘language’ now in order to avoid the brewing of a use-of-term debate later; for the purposes of this paper, language refers to not only its verbal or written forms, but also to all of its gestural elements or word replacements.

The first part of this essay explores the ways in which the idea that thought is not independent of language is expressed in the writings of celebrated philosophers, psychologists, poets, writers, historians and scientists until the middle of the nineteenth century. Starting from as early as Plato and working our way up to the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, in what follows, I hope to show that even though the actual effects of language on one’s mental process are different from the claims made in the past, such opinions are far from being unexciting, ordinary, or unimportant.

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Of course, there cannot be a discussion of theories offered by different people throughout history without an inevitable presence of a debate. Part two of this paper investigates the various opinions, theories and claims made after Schleiermacher. In the early twentieth century, Humboldt’s analysis marked the basis of our modern understanding of language and its influence on thought. Sapir and Whorf argued that the language we speak entirely governs our conscious (and called it linguistic relativity), and Chomsky, who rules out the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and most others on a basic theoretical level.

The third part sets out to provide an example of how language affects our thinking, and directs our perception of reality. The Boas-Jacobson principle finds truth in studying what various languages oblige speakers to use. The paper focuses on the Guuru Yimithirr language (purely due to fascination reasons), in which the speakers are obliged to communicate their geographical coordinates at all times, and have no concept of left and right like us, rather a constant knowledge of North, South, East and West.

Some argue that language determines thought, while others claim that there is a degree to which a form of language affects the way speakers think. This essay concludes, through the evidence supplied by language, that the fundamental aspects of our thought are undoubtedly influenced by the linguistic conventions in which we are born. The questions explored are ages old, and all of them are concerned with the extent to which language influences our thought. Does it govern it, or do we simply utilise it to express our mental process? Does the language we use help us think, or will thought be inexistent in the absence of a linguistic form? Does language reflect or construct thought?

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CHAPTER ONE Early Understanding of the Effect of Language upon Thinking “The art of reasoning is nothing more than a language well arranged” Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794) The idea that a form of language influences thinking has been studied throughout the years and it is expressed in the writings of numerous celebrated philosophers, scientists, literary critics, philologists and linguists. In order to provide an effective gradual account of how we as people have bounded the concept of the relation between language and thought, this chapter follows a historical framework of events.

Although we do not find any extensive discussion of the ways in which language affects thought in Plato’s writings, anyone who has read them easily agrees that Plato was concerned with how words might relate to concepts and to realities. In the Sophist he introduces the idea that ‘thought’ (διάνοια) and speech (λόγος) are the same; only the former is actually a silent inner conversation with the soul (Marlowe, 2011: 2). Plato’s pupil Aristotle also focuses on the problem of thinking being entirely encapsulated in words. He warns that ‘even in his inward thoughts a man is liable to be deceived, when he examines the matter on the basis of words’ (Stewart, 1829: 92).

It is important to notice that even though Plato foolishly refers to thinking as a conversation with the soul, both him and Aristotle recognise that the mental process exists solely in the form of words. Therefore, having a form of thought process without a form of language seemed ultimately impossible.

At the beginning of the third century AD, as the Christian religion gained strength, Tertullian (c. 160 – c. 225 AD), a prominent theologian of the time, writes about the inseperability of language and thought. In Against Praxeas, his paper written approximately A.D. 215, Tertullian explains that because the very thoughts of God are framed in ‘The Word’, it becomes none other than the objectified form of God’s thoughts.

Whatever you think there is a word; whatever you conceive, there is reason. You must needs speak it in your mind; and while you are speaking, you admit speech as an interlocutor with you, involved in 3

which there is this very reason, whereby, while in thought you are holding converse with your word, you are (by reciprocal action) producing thought by means of that converse with your word. Thus, in a certain sense, the word is a second person within you, through which in thinking you utter speech, and though which also (by reciprocity of process), in uttering speech you generate thought.

(Holmes, 1870: 1088) Tertullian provokes the readers to consider the instrumentality on their own mind, in which rational thoughts are dependent upon words. He does not spend much time developing the idea any further, however it is important to consider the ease with which Tertullian assertains the relationship between language and thought, as if it was an all-known fact of psychology and philosophy.

The precision of terms and their definitions plays a crucial part in passing the correct message from God, and all ancient and medieval theologists had concerns for the definitude of the language they used. It is obvious that whenever philosophers begin to focus upon problems of terminology they try to improve ordninary language, because it is not sufficiently correct for its purposes. But in the past we have seen that in nearly every field of learning there has always been a gradual development of technical vocabulary, which emerges from the ordinary spoken language at the time.

The academic texts and books of antiquity are written in a language that was never used in ordinary speech, therefore the idea that ordinary language is sufficient to express philosophical or theological ideas was never accepted.

Towards the end of the seventeenth century, in a chapter on ‘The Abuse fo Words’, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), John Locke (1632-1704) states that we should have a great many fewer disputes in the world, if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves; for when we argue about matter, or an the like term, we truly argue only about the idea we express by that found, whether that specific idea agree to any thing really existing in nature or no. (Locke, 1975).

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Locke relates words to the ideas they represent, claiming that man is unique in being able to separate sounds into disctinct forms, signify these forms with concepts, represent these concepts by words, and use these words to build a language. In the particular quote Locke puts a great power in words, because they shape the thoughts of men, though he would rather have it otherwise, by believing that words are ‘the signs of our ideas only, and not for the things themselves’. Locke was the first one to discuss ‘wrong’ thinking, or sloppyness in the way we determine which words represents which concepts. He criticises philosophers of the time who make up new words without clearly difining them, or re-introduce old words with a new criteria or meanings underlying the term. Locke was concerned with the fact that every word reflects a specific idea or concept; what if the term is not good enough in reflecting what it is supposed to? What if it is not understood by everyone? And most importanly, what if the term changes what it represents on a regular basis?

Nevertheless, Locke’s general attitude towards the effects of language was negative, and he spoke about it cautionary, in order for people to escape linguistic traps, and transcend the limits of ordinary language.

The writings of Locke were very influential in the beginning of the eighteenth century, and it did not take long for philosophers througout Europe to start building upon his ideas. The French philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715-1780) published an Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge (Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines, 1746), which he believed acted as a developed succession of Locke’s concerns. Condillac explored language as the source from which senses and emotions are modified into higher mental competence. He supports the idea that our form of language correlates with the intelligence we obtain, and since language is sloppy as Locke argued, ‘concequently, it is demonstratable that there can be no such thing as superior genius, till the language of a nation has been considerably improved.’ (Condillac, 1746: 290).

Later that same century in Germany, another philosopher wrote about the relationship of language to thought. Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803) wrote his Essay on Diligence in Several Learned Languages (Über den Fleiß in mehreren gelehrten Sprachen, 1764). Condillac believed that each language expresses the character of the 5

people who speak it;; to build onto that, Herder claimed that ‘the intellect and the character of every nation are stamped in its language’. Industrious nations, he said, ‘have an abundance of moods in their verbs, while more refined nations have a large amount of nouns that have been exalted to abstract notions.’ (Herder, 1877:354-345).

It is not a secret that German is the language of philosophy, mainly because it naturally constructs various terms to use in describing ambiguous concepts. Herder did not try to be humble about speaking one of the best suited languages for theoretical, crative and factual writings; his focus upon language and cultural traditions of his motherland extended to include dance, music, art, folklore, and inspired the German folk tales of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. Nevertheless, when discussing the relationship of language and thought, Herder is never given the credit deserved. He was the first to claim that thought is dependent on language, some twenty years before Humboldt, and more than a century before Sapir. He maintains that language is ‘the form of cognition, not mearly in which but also in accordance with which thoughts take shape, where in all parts of literature thought sticks [klept] to expression, and forms itself in accordance with this.... Language sets limits and contour for all human cognition.’ (Herder, 1767, cited in Marlowe, 2011:6).

For the next half a century, experts from all fields of science began to put more imporntance on the use of words in their work. Antoine Lavoisier, who to this day is considered the father of modern chemistry, when writing his Elements of Chemistry (1789) realised that there was not enough terms in the language to explain all of his concepts, and reforming the glossary of chemistry became of absolute necessity. At the start of the nineteenth century, a German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher published an Essay on the Different Methods of Translating (1813), in which he said: Every human being is [...] in the power of the language he speaks; he and his whole thinking are a product of it. He cannot, with complete certainty, think anything that lies outside the limits of language. The form of his concepts, the way and means of connecting them, is outlined for him through the language in which he is born and educated; intellect and imagination are bound by it.

(Schleiermacher, 1813, cited in Marlowe, 2011:7) This summarises more than eighteen centuries of in-depth discussions on the relationship of language and thought. Many philosophers spent time trying to 6

determine the importance of language on the way we express ourselves, the way we think and the way we perceive reality. Up until this point, there is still no specific theory that people could refer to, or debate; however, it is unarguable that the question of whether or not the form of language we use in conversation directly influences our thought process, has perplexed thinkers since the beginning of philosophy.

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CHAPTER TWO The Age of Linguistic Relativity “A long and complex train of thought can no more be carried on without the aid of words, whether spoken or silent, than a long calculation without the use of figures or algebra” Charles Darwin (1809-1882) Even though numerous prominent people discussed the effects of language on thought, in the nineteenth century the topic still remained on the level of occasional rhetorical flourishes. During those years it was still generally accepted, not just by ordinary men but by philologists themselves, that the only worthy languages of serious study are Latin and Greek, and occasionally Hebrew, Aramaic and Sanscrit. All European languages were considered degenerate forms of the clasical Latin and Greek, and the languages from illiterate tribes were regarded uninteresting, unintelligent and primitive. Nevertheless, though most European countries differ in numerous ways, the people of the continent never considered that ‘these intra-European differences are ultimately minor variations in essentially the same religion and the same culinary culture’, when compared to ones from foreign parts of the world. (Deutscher, 2010:132). Missionaries at the time found it difficult to translate the word of God in new languages, organised on fundamentally different principles form those of Latin.

They failed to understand the different features of grammer of a New World language, but worst of all, they did not realise that there was something intricate to understand in first place.

Wilhelm von Humboldt

Enter one of the stellar figures of the nineteenth century, Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835), a German philosopher, educational reformer and founder of the University of Berlin. He was frustrated by the lack of translated documents privided by missionaries, as well as their general sense of oblivion to the linguistic treasure that the languages represented. He was interested in the ordinary languages of various people around the world; in his determination to understand how Native American 8

tongues worked, Humboldt rewrote many of the grammers, and gradually developed the real structure of the languages.

The connections between language and thought are major themes of Humboldt’s research, and in 1836 he published a book titled The Diversity of Human LanguageConstruction and its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind, a work often mentioned as ‘the first great book on general linguistics.’ (Bloomfield, 1933:18).

Humboldt researched the fundamental idea that people use languages to think, so language tends to shape the thoughts of the people who use them. And contrary to Locke, who spoke about the effects of language in an unfavourable manner, Humboldt recognized the creative and positive aspect of that idea. He said that ‘by adding meaning to the world of objects, languages help their users to make sense of the world, though in diverse ways.’ (Marlowe, 2011:10).

This is the point where mentioning Immanuel Kant’s philosophy of the mind is inevitable. Kant’s influential Critique of Pure Reason (1781) explains that the human mind is not a ‘blank slate’ upon which new information is built, but an organ, which actively organises the world into categories. Humboldt linguistically adapted Kant’s theory by determining that the individual traits of each language are responsible for the ordering and categorising of experiences and data in different ways. Therefore, ‘speakers of different languages live partly in different worlds and have different systems of thinking’. (Robins, 1997:166).

Since ‘language is the forming organ of thought’, there must be a complex relation between the rules of grammar and the laws of thinking. ‘Thinking,’ Humboldt concludes, ‘is dependent not just on language in general, but to a certain extent on each individual language’. (Humboldt, 1820, cited in Deutscher, 2010:136).

Edward Sapir

During the century separating Humboldt from Sapir, philosophers like John Stuart Mill and Arthur Schopenhauer, theologian Richard Chevenix Trench, and psychologist William James all discussed and built upon Humboldt’s reasoning. But it was not until beginning of the twentieth century, when an American linguist (a term 9

opposed by himself) Edward Sapir revolutionised the world of linguistics by sparking the notions of what later became known as the principle of linguistic relativity. Like his professor, Franz Boas, Sapir noticed how thoroughly languages are entrapped in their cultural contexts, and he believed that the study of languages cannot be separated from anthropology or psychology. (Marlowe, 2011:15).

Like Humboldt a century before him, Sapir started his linguistic career by studying the Native American languages. One has to achlowledge that unlike Humboldt who had to read translations provided by missionaries, in Sapir’s time everything was much more advanced and the science of language had undergone a general rise in sophistication. When these advanced tools begun to be applied in Sapir’s studies of Native American languages, new grammatical horizons were revealed, ones that Humboldt would not have even dreamed of. He started talking about the ‘tyrannical hold that linguistic form has upon our orientation in the world’, (Sapir, 1931:578).

Sapir studied the claims made about language’s influence on philosophical ideas and concluded that the structure of one’s mother tongue affects everyday thoughts and perceptions.

In 1931 Sapir introduced an example from Nootka language (spoken on Vancouver island), which was to show how the specific grammatical differences in a language affect speaker’s thoughts. In English, when a stone is moving through space, we divide the event into two seperate notions: the stone and the action of falling (so, the ‘stone falls’). In the Nootka language, there is no word that corresponds to the verb ‘to fall’. Instead, a speacial verb, ‘to stone’ is used for the notion of a stone moving through space. To add the ‘falling’, in Nootka one would combine it with the element ‘down’. So in Nootka, a statement like the ‘stone falls’ would be described as ‘[it] stones down’. (Deutscher, 2010). Such concrete examples of incommnsurable analysis of experience in different languages make it very real to us a kind of reality that is generally hidden from us by our naive acceptance of fixed habits of speech... This is the relativity of concepts or, as it mght be called, the relativity of the form of thought (Sapir, 1931, cited in Deutscher, 2010:139).

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Sapir is saying, in very ambiguous manner, that as long as there are differences in the way the grammar of a language is structured, the speakers of that language will differ in the way they percieve reality. In the example with the falling stone, Sapir suggests that since the Nootka speakers do not have a term for the verb ‘to fall’, that they mentally process that motion in a different way to us. Unfortunately, it was exactly because Sapir hid behind the shield of vague philosophical statements, that his specific linguistic examples do not endow significant power to his own beliefs. The Nootka expression ‘[it] stones down’ is definately a little strange, however just because a different use of words is displayed, does not mean that the speakers experience the action differently. Are the differences in the way our languages express the idea of ‘falling’ no more than merely differences in grammatical organisation? And if the Nootka speakers are taught a different way of expressing the motion of a falling stone, would that change their perception of the motion?

Benjamin Lee Whorf

To rescue Sapir out of the whirlpool of his weakly supported statements, his best student Benjamin Lee Whorf elaborated upon his teacher’s observations regarding the relationship of language to thought. He led on to formulate what is known as the theory of linguistic relativity, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfian hypothesis.

The basic idea of the theory was introduced by Humboldt, and especially in Europe it is known as ‘Humboldtian’, referring to the whole tradition stemming from his influence. In an article published in 1940, Whorf said he has called the ‘linguistic relativity principle,’ which means, in informal terms, that users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars toward different types of observations and different evaluations of externally similar acts of observation, and hence are not equivalent as observers, but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world. (Whorf, 1940, cited in Carroll, 1956:221) Whorf states that language is the medium through which one views the world, culture reality and thought. He believed that the grammar of each language is not merely a ‘reproducing instrument for voicing ideas, but rather is itself the shaper of ideas. […]

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We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages’ (Whorf, 1956, cited in Deutscher, 2010:140).

Whorf’s main focus of study was the Hopi language from north-eastern Arizona (even though he never got the chance to go there). It was not long before Whorf collected the evidence and reached the spectacular revelation that the Hopi language contains ‘no words, grammatical forms, constructions or expressions that refer directly to what we call ‘time,’ or to past, present or future.’ (Whorf, 1956, cited in Deutscher, 2010:142). The discovery was so different from anything that anyone had previously been able to imagine, that it made Whorf obtain a lot of popularity during the middle of the twentieth century, and his concept had come to be regarded as an uncontroversial truism in many circles. Unfortunate for his reputation, in 1983, the linguist Ekkehart Malotki published a book called Hopi Time, which describes numerous expressions for time in the Hopi language, as well as forms of tenses.

Linguistic relativity soon became an idea in disgrace. Many researchers began to feel that Whorf’s examples failed to demonstrate a real relationship between language and thought. Nevertheless, the Whorfian hypothesis has been beneficial to the progress of science, because it exposed two major errors, which every theory about the influence of language on thought must avoid. The first one is Whorf’s ‘addiction to fantasies unfettered by facts’ (Deutscher, 2010:148), which led him to make assumptions with no valid proof or extended study. That was seen in his research of the Hopi language, which pushed Whorf to determine that ‘language X does things differently from language Y, and hence speakers of language X must think differently from speakers of Y’ (Deutscher, 2010:148). Even if it were true, there is no certainty that it is specifically the language which forms these differences in thought process; rather other factors such as the speakers’ cultures and environments. The second lesson that linguistic relativity has taught us is that we must escape from the boundaries built by language, and understand that it does not constrain our ability to think logically, as Sapir and Whorf suggested. Language does not constrain its speakers from understanding new concepts. Of course this statement does not mean that one can talk about any subject in any language in its current state. Try to translate the operating manual of a washing machine to a tribe from the Papuan highlands; in their language there are no words for most of the instructions in the manual (starting from the actual 12

washing machine, down to buttons and digital screens). However, that does not prevent the Papuans from understanding such concepts at all; it simply means that they are not acquainted with the relevant cultural terminology. Given time everything can be explained in their mother tongue.

The Independence of Linguistics and Noam Chomsky

In the late nineteen-fifties, the idea of linguistic relativity was rejected by professional linguists as a matter of principle. In order to understand this stubborn rejection of Whorfian ideas, one has to turn back two decades, when Leonard Bloomfield began to take linguistics in a new direction. While Sapir emphasised on the importance of studying languages in their cultural contexts, Bloomfield wanted to extract the science of languages from all anthropological, psychological, historical and literary studies.

That is when linguistics became its own separate science, much to Sapir’s dismay.

Despite his efforts to convince everyone that languages must be pursued by scholars with extensive training in other disciplines, Bloomfield’s movement towards specialisation was strong, and it was at that time that the word ‘linguistics’ came into use.

The student of literature observes the utterances of certain persons (say, of a Shakespeare) and concerns himself with the content and with the unusual features of form. The interest of the philologist is even broader, for he is concerned with the cultural significance and background of what he reads. The linguist, on the other hand, studies the language of all persons alike; the individual features in which the language of a great writer differs from the ordinary speech of his time and place, interest the linguist no more than do the individual features of any other person’s speech, and much less than do the features that are common to all speakers. (Bloomfield, 1933:22).

Bloomfield encourages linguists to move away from the focus upon particularities and differences in language, and target their studies more and more upon basic elements found in all languages. This tendency gained force in the nineteen-sixties, with the work of the American linguist, Noam Chomsky, who began to develop a general theory of universal grammar. He theorised that beneath the vast variety of languages, there is a common and innate mental sub-culture, which formulates language. ‘The 13

deep structures of language are conceived as a kind of inherited human grammar in which kernel statements are transformed and built up into sentences.’ (Chomsky, 1965, cited in Marlowe, 2011:19). Chomsky’s approach does not leave any room for emphasis upon the importance of linguistic particularities, or indeed any in-depth study of the ways in which languages may affect thinking Nevertheless, Chomsky became a prominent linguist and his views are commonly accepted within scholars. There are two main reasons this is so. The first one is the fact that the establishment of linguistics as a separate discipline required an emphasis on universals. When the focus of languages was abstracted from their cultural and psychological context, that which was common to all languages had to become the subject matter of the field. The second reason that Chomsky’s claims were strongly accepted was the fact that after WWII, the emphasis on universals was especially compatible within the intellectual culture of the age. The war created a protective shield against anyone who dared to imply a form of dissimilarity among people, because they ‘are the same everywhere’, and diversity was only mentioned in matter of skin colour, national foods, or traditional wear. The idea that differences between languages could be significant was seen as slightly racist, or at least incompatible with the ideals of many international intellectuals of the time.

It is fair to say that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was never fully disproved by the Chomskyan followers. ‘Rather, it had simply evaporated as an object of serious study among those linguists who were intent upon developing the universalistic implications of Chomsky’s theories.’ (Marlowe, 2011:21) Nonetheless, it is obvious that his beliefs are damaging to the question of the relation between language and thought, and practically rule out the idea of linguistic relativity on a basic theoretical level.

In this part of the paper we followed the development of the study of language throughout the twentieth century. Humboldt introduced the concept of thought being affected by language, on a grammatical level, by basing his theories on his research of the Native American translations brought back from missionaries. A century later, Sapir took over and introduced the basics of the linguistic relativity hypothesis, which was developed to its final stage by Whorf, Sapir’s loyal student. Meanwhile, 14

Bloomfield revolutionised the science of languages, by extracting it from all other cultural or anthropological studies, which inspired Chomsky to develop his theory of universal grammar.

Concrete and theoretical as all this may sound, none of the scholars, philosophers and linguists above have actually delved into the true meaning of the effects of language upon thought. It is as if all of them are missing an element of reminder, an alarm clock that prompts them to try and solve a dilemma centuries old. In between all these theories and personal debates, there is one investigation flooding inspiration back to the question (inspiration seemingly absent for most of the twentieth century), the Boas-Jacobson principle.

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CHAPTER THREE Life in Geographic System of Coordinates “Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested ten thousand lightning flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing, as the lightning.”

Richard C. Trench (1807-1886) The writing from Sapir and Whorf kindled a huge change in the way in which scholars view language and thought. But after lack of evidence that would give the hypothesis validity, most researchers found it hard to conclude that language determines thought. After Whorf’s study of the Hopi language, it is acceptable to suggest that language does partially determine thought, and in determining linguistic relativity the question was never whether or not language affects one’s thought, but to what degree. (Wierzbicka, 1992:7). This is the most exciting section of this paper, because what follows is the most logical (in any language) theory explaining the relation of language to thought, the Boas – Jacobson principle.

The Boas-Jacobson Principle

Franz Boas was Sapir’s professor at Yale, and he was the one who introduced the Native American languages to his student. In 1938, Boas made an observation about the role of grammar in language, and said that it ‘determines those aspects of each experience that must be expressed’ (Boas, 1938:132-133). He goes on to explain that such obligatory factors differ greatly between languages. Unfortunately his claims were not fully appreciated until about two decades later, when the Russian-American linguist Roman Jacobson boxed everything Boas said into a simple but exceptional statement: ‘Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey’ (Jacobson, 1959, cited in Deutscher, 2010:151). What Jacobson says is that the crucial differences between languages are not what they allow its speakers to express (in theory all languages should be able to express everything), but the information that a language obliges its speakers to express.

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Examples explaining this principle can be found in all languages. For instance, in English, if one wants to say: ‘I had dinner with my friend’, the speakers are not obliged to share the gender of the ‘friend’, and it could be ‘her’ or ‘him’. In Bulgarian, a language in the same group as most other tongues that use gender distinctions of nouns, the word ‘friend’ must be portrayed with its gender specifications. One will either say ‘priatel’ (friend-male) or ‘priatelka’ (friendfemale). It means that English speakers are not obliged to specify the sex each time the ‘friend’ is mentioned, while Bulgarian speakers are.

Neither Boas nor Jacobson were emphasising grammatical differences in relation to the influences of language on thought. Nevertheless, it seems that the Boas-Jacobson principle is the key to unlocking the actual effects a certain language has on the thought process of its speakers. If different languages influence their speakers to think in varying ways (as in the example with English and Bulgarian ‘friend’), it is not because of what each language allows people to think, but rather because of the kinds of information that each language naturally obliges people to think about. (Deutscher, 2010:152). When a language forces people to (subconsciously) pay attention to certain aspects of the world, such habits of speech eventually settle into the mind, the memory, and the perception and understanding of reality.

The Language of Spatial Direction

The Guugu Yimithirr provides linguists with one of the most fascinating examples of a language that openly obliges its speakers to think differently from us. The way in which the Guugu Yimithirr language describes the arrangements of objects in space is incredibly odd to us, so when the peculiarities of the language were uncovered, they inspired linguists to conduct a large scale research project into the language of space.

Directly translated: ‘guugu’ is ‘language’, and ‘yimi-thirr’ means ‘this way’, so Guugu Yimithirr is something like: ‘this kind of language’ or ‘talking this way’. The Australian aboriginal tribe (of whose language there are not many speakers left), has a distinct manner of talking about spatial relations that is not similar in any other world language.

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We use coordinates such as left, right, forward and backwards as a general form of direction. When someone gives directions, he would probably say something like: ‘At the traffic lights, straight ahead, then the first street to you left, then the first road to the right, and my house is at the end of that road, to the left of the gas station.’ This system of coordinates is very egocentric because the two axes depend on the location of one’s body at the time. This coordinate system moves around with us wherever we turn. (Deutscher, 2010:161). The Guugu Yimithirr language of the Aborigines uses another system of coordinates, which functions through fixed geographic directions, based on the compass’ very own North, South, East, and West. These directions do not change with one’s movements;; North will always remain to the North, no matter how much one twist and turns. So in the example of the directions to one’s house, in Guugu Yimithirr one would say: ‘At the traffic lights, keep North (for the purposes of this example), then the first street to the West, then the first street to the North, and my house is at the North end, to the West of the gas station’.

The system of cardinal coordinates is based on external concept of personal location as a part of a grand universal coordinate system (computing of the sun, stars, or features of the landscape), rather than an egocentric system, which changes with the position of one’s body. Every two words out of ten relate to spatial information, therefore it is embedded in their manner of communication. The speakers of Guugu Yimithirr not only have to have an innate ability to recognise their location, and the location of other objects, in relation to the geographic coordinates at all time, but they are also obliged to share it in order to conduct a simple conversation.

The Boas-Jacobson principle looks at what languages oblige their speakers to convey, rather than what it allows them to. In this particular case, the relevant question is what habits of mind develop in Guugu Yimithirr speakers, due to their necessity to specify geographic directions whenever spatial information is communicated. The answer is obvious; in order to speak Guugu Yimithirr, one has to be aware of where the cardinal directions are at each moment of time. Does this mean that we and the speakers of the Guugu Yimithirr language sometimes remember the same reality differently? If two hotel rooms are arranged in an identical manner, but are positioned on two opposite sides of a building (one facing North, and the other South), we would remember them in the exact same way, however the speakers of Guugu Yimithirr will remember two 18

absolutely different rooms, because every object in them will hold a different geographical position. So the answer must be yes, at least to the extent that two realities can seem identical to us, and appear different to them.

One has to conclude that the mother tongue is a significant factor in causing the patterns of spatial memory and orientation. Language is not directly responsible for creating the sense of orientation in anyone. However, a language like Guugu Yimithirr indirectly brings about the sense of orientation and geographic memory, ‘because the convention of communicating only in geographic coordinates compels the speakers to be aware of directions all the time, forcing them to pay constant attention to the relevant environmental clues and to develop an accurate memory of their own changing orientation.’ (Deutscher, 2010:187). It is the Guugu Yimithirr language, which obliges them to have a concept of geographic coordinates, and undeniably, the speakers of that language perceive the world differently.

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CONCLUSION One cannot think without the use of a form of language; however the extent to which their thoughts are governed by this language varies depending on the particularities of the language. Some tongues might indirectly influence its speakers to know the direction of the geographic coordinates, while others must determine the gender of every noun. The debate, which has kept celebrated thinkers busy for years, is to what extent does the language we speak influence the way we think.

According to Humboldt, Sapir and Whorf, grammatical differences in a language determine the way in which its speakers express their thoughts. During the same time, Bloomfield exceeded his reputation by reforming the science of languages, when linguistics was separated from all other cultural, anthropological and philological studies. Not long after him, Chomsky theorised that there is a universal form of grammatical law that governs the basics of all languages, which limits the study of individual tongues on a purely theoretical level.

Nevertheless, up to this point, nobody has managed to provide a good enough example to suggest how each specific language has its own influence on the thought and action of its speakers. This paper supports the Boas-Jacobson principle, which determines that a language can affect the way its speakers think to a certain extent, because every specific language obliges its speakers to think about different things.

This is best portrayed in the example of the Guugu Yimithirr language, where the speakers are obliged to have a constant awareness of their geographic location in terms of the cardinal spatial system.

It is unarguable that the underlying architecture of human consciousness requires thoughts to be linguistically expressed, if they are to be conscious. The debate to what extent language influences thought has not been resolved, however what we can be sure of is that the influence of language has been empirically demonstrated in areas of thought, memory, perception of reality, and expression of the human mind.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bloomfield, Leonard, 1933. Language, New York: Henry Holt and Co. Boas, Franz, 1938. Language. In General Anthropology, Boston: D. C. Heath.

Carroll, John (ed.) 1956. Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Condillac, Étienne Bonnot, 1746. Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, London: J.Nourse.

Deutscher, Guy, 2010. Through the Language Glass, London: Arrow Books.

Herder, Johann Gottfried, 1877. Essay on the Diligence in Several Learned Languages, Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung.

Holmes, Peter, 1870. The Ante-Nicene Christian Library: Translations of the Fathers down to A.D. 325, vol. XV, The Writings of Tertullian, vol II, Edinburgh: T & T Clark.

Locke, John, 1975. Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Marlowe, Michael, 2004 (revisited 2011). The Effect of Language upon Thinking, [online] Available at: < http://www.bible-researcher.com/linguistics.html > [Accessed: December 3, 2011].

Robins, Robert, 1997. A Short History of Linguistics, London and New York: Longman Sapir, Edward, 1931. Conceptual Categories in Primitive Languages, New Haven: National Academy of Sciences.

Stewart, Dugald, 1829. Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, Cambridge: Hillard and Brown.

Wierzbicka, Anna, 1992. Semantics, Culture and Cognition, New York: Oxford University Press.

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Quote Chapter One Lavoisier, Antoine, 1790. Elements of Chemistry (translated by Robert Kerr), Edinburgh.

Quote Chapter Two Darwin, Charles, 1871. On the Descent of man and Selection in Relation to Sex, vol.I, London: Murray.

Quote Chapter Three Trench, Richard, 1855. On the Study of Words: Lectures Addressed (Originally) to the Pupils at the Diocesan Training-school, Winchester, London: John W. Parker and Sons

Word Count: 6,491

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