Nevertheless, the argument advanced here is that 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. John Haviland estimates that as many as one word in ten (!) in a normal Guugu Yimithirr conversation is north, south, west, or east, often accompanied by very precise hand gestures. Put another way, everyday communication in Guugu Yimithirr provides the most intense drilling in geographic orientation from the earliest imaginable age. If you have to know your bearings to understand the simplest things people say around you, you will develop the habit of calculating and remembering the cardinal directions at every second of your life. And as this habit of mind will be inculcated almost from infancy, it will soon become second nature, effortless and unconscious.
The causal link between language and spatial thinking thus seems far more plausible than the case of language and hair color. Still, plausibility by no means constitutes proof. And as it happens, some psychologists and linguists, such as Peggy Li, Lila Gleitman, and Steven Pinker, have challenged the claim that it is primarily language that influences spatial memory and orientation. In The Stuff of Thought, Pinker argues that people develop their spatial thinking for reasons unrelated to language, and that languages merely reflect the fact that their speakers think in a certain coordinate system anyway. He points out that it is small rural societies that rely primarily on geographic coordinates, whereas all large urban societies rely predominantly on egocentric coordinates. From this undeniable fact he concludes that the system of coordinates used in a language is determined directly by the physical environment: if you live in a city you will spend much of your time indoors, and even when you venture outside, turning right and then left and then left again after the traffic lights will be the easiest way of orienting yourself, so the environment will encourage you to think primarily in egocentric coordinates. Your language will then simply reflect the fact that you think in the egocentric system anyway. On the other hand, if you are a nomad in the Australian bush, there are no roads or second left turnings after the traffic lights to guide you, so egocentric directions will be far less useful and you will naturally come to think in geographic coordinates. The way you then end up speaking about space will just be a symptom of the way you think anyway.
What is more, says Pinker, the environment determines not just the choice between egocentric and geographic coordinates but even the particular type of geographic coordinates that will be used in a language. It is surely not a coincidence that the Tzeltal system relies on a prominent geographic landmark, whereas the Guugu Yimithirr system uses compass directions. The environment of Tzeltal speakers is dominated by a visible landmark, the uphill-downhill slope, and so it is only natural for them to depend on this axis rather than on the more elusive compass directions. But as the environment of the Guugu Yimithirr lacks such prominent landmarks, it is no wonder that their axes are based on compass directions. In short, Pinker claims that the environment has decreed for us what coordinates we think in, and it is spatial thinking that determines spatial language, not vice versa.
While Pinker’s facts are hardly quibbleable with, his environmental determinism is unconvincing for several reasons. It makes sense, of course, that each culture would home in on a coordinate system suitable for its environment. Still, it is crucial to realize that different cultures have a considerable degree of freedom. For example, there is nothing in the physical environment of the Guugu Yimithirr that precludes their using both geographic coordinates (for large-scale space) and egocentric coordinates (for small-scale). There is no conceivable reason why a traditional hunter-gatherer existence would prevent anyone from saying “there is an ant in front of your foot” instead of “to the north of your foot.” After all, as a description of small-scale spatial relations, “in front of your foot” is just as sensible and just as useful in the Australian bush as it is inside an office in London or Manhattan. This is not merely a theoretical argument—there are various languages of societies similar to Guugu Yimithirr that indeed use both egocentric and geographic coordinates. Even in Australia itself, there are aboriginal languages, such as Jaminjung in the Northern Territory, that do not rely only on geographic coordinates. So Guugu Yimithirr’s exclusive use of geographic coordinates was not directly imposed by the physical environment or by the hunter-gatherer way of life. It is a cultural convention. The categorical refusal of Guugu Yimithirr ants ever to crawl “in front of” Guugu Yimithirr feet is not a decree of nature but an expression of cultural choice.
What is more, there are odd pairs of languages around the world that are spoken in similar environments but have nevertheless chosen to rely on different coordinate systems. Tzeltal, as we have seen, uses geographic coordinates almost exclusively, but Yukatek, another Mayan language of a rural community from Mexico, predominantly employs egocentric coordinates. In the savannah of northern Namibia, the Hai||om bushmen speak about space like the Tzeltal and Guugu Yimithirr, whereas the language of the Kgalagadi tribe from neighboring Botswana, who live in a similar environment, relies heavily on egocentric coordinates. And when two anthropologists compared how Hai||om and Kgalagadi speakers responded to rotation experiments of the type we saw earlier, most Hai||om speakers offered geographic solutions (like the one that seemed counterintuitive to us), whereas the Kgalagadi tended to give egocentric solutions.
So the coordinate system of each language cannot have been completely determined by the environment, and this means that different cultures must have exercised some choice. In fact, all the evidence suggests that we should turn to the maxim “freedom within constraints” as the best way to understand culture’s influence on the choice of coordinate systems. Nature—in this case the physical environment—certainly places constraints on the types of coordinate system that can be used sensibly in a given language. But there is considerable freedom within these constraints to select from different alternatives.
There is another critical error in Pinker’s environmental determinism, namely his glossing over the fact that the environment does not interact directly with a toddler or small child—it does so only through the mediation of upbringing. To clarify this point, we need to keep two different issues strictly apart. The first is the question of what the historical reasons were that caused a certain society to home in on a certain system of coordinates. The second issue, which is the one that is actually relevant for us here, is what happens to John Smith, an individual speaker of a Guugu Yimithirr–style language, when he grows up, and in particular what was mainly responsible for bringing about his perfect pitch for directions. Suppose we had evidence that John’s skill developed only in his late teens or early twenties, after he had been on countless hunting expeditions and has spent thousands of hours of trekking in the wild. The argument that language had much to do with creating this skill would have looked rather feeble, since it would have been far more plausible that this skill developed as a direct response to the environment, that the training and drilling came from his experiences of hunting and trekking and so on. But as it happens, we know that the geographic coordinate system is learned at a very early age. Studies of Tzeltal-speaking children show that they start using the geographic vocabulary by age two, that by age four they use geographic coordinates correctly to describe the arrangement of objects, and that they master the system by age seven. Alas, Guugu Yimithirr children no longer acquire the system at all, because the community is now dominated by English. But studies with Balinese children show similar results to Tzeltal: children in Bali use geographic coordinates by age three and a half and master the system by age eight.
At the age of two or three or even seven, John Smith has no idea about the reasons why his society, centuries or millennia ago, chose this or the other coord
inate system, and whether that choice was suitable for the environment or not. He simply has to learn the system of his elders as given. And since constant and unfailing awareness of directions is required to use the geographic system correctly, John Smith must have developed his perfect pitch for directions at a very young age, long before it could have been a direct response to the needs of survival in the physical environment, the exigencies of hunting, and so on.
All this goes to show that the system of coordinates you speak and think in is determined for you not directly by the environment but rather by the way you were brought up—or, in other words, through the mediation of culture. Of course, one may still object that there is more to the way one is brought up than just language. So we cannot simply take for granted that language in particular, rather than anything else in a Tzeltal or Guugu Yimithirr speaker’s upbringing, was the primary reason for inducing geographic thinking. I have argued that the main cause here is simply the constant need to calculate directions in order to speak and understand others. But at least in theory, one cannot rule out the possibility that children develop their geographic thinking for an entirely different reason, say because of intense explicit tuition in orientation from an early age.
In fact, there is one example in our own egocentric system of coordinates, the left-right asymmetry, which teaches us to be cautious. For most Western adults, left and right seem second nature, but children have great difficulties in mastering the distinction and generally manage it only at a very late age. Most children cannot cope with these concepts even passively until well into school age and don’t use left and right actively in their own language until around the age of eleven. This late age of acquisition, and especially the fact that children often master the distinction only through the brute force of schooling (including, of course, the need to acquire literacy and master the inherent sidedness of letters), makes it unlikely that the left-right distinction was acquired simply through the requirements of daily communication.
But while the left-right distinction in our own egocentric system serves as a warning against jumping to conclusions about causation, the marked difference between the late acquisition of left-right and the early acquisition of geographic coordinates highlights exactly the reasons why, in the latter case, language is by far the most plausible cause. There is no evidence of formal tuition in geographic coordinates at an early age (although there is evidence from Bali of some geographically relevant religious practices, such as putting children to bed with the head pointing in a particular geographic direction). So the only imaginable mechanism that could provide such intense drilling in orientation at such a young age is the spoken language—the need to know the directions in order to be able to communicate about the simplest aspects of everyday life.
There is thus a compelling case that the relation between language and spatial thinking is not just correlation but causation, and that one’s mother tongue affects how one thinks about space. In particular, a language like Guugu Yimithirr, which forces its speakers to use geographic coordinates at all times, must be a crucial factor in bringing about the perfect pitch for directions and the corresponding patterns of memory that seem so weird and unattainable to us.
Two centuries after Guugu Yimithirr bequeathed “kangaroo” to the world, its last remaining speakers gave the world a harsh lesson in philosophy and psychology. Guugu Yimithirr proved—tongue on teeth—that a language can do perfectly well without concepts that had long been considered as universal building blocks of spatial language and thought. This recognition illuminated concepts of our own language, which our common sense would have sworn were simply decreed for us by nature, but which only seem so because our common sense happened to grow up in a culture that employs these concepts. Guugu Yimithirr provided a glaring example—brighter even than the language of color—of cultural conventions that masquerade as nature.
What is more, the research that Guugu Yimithirr inspired has furnished the most striking example so far of how language can affect thought. It has shown how speech habits, imprinted from an early age, can create habits of mind that have far-reaching consequences beyond speaking, as they affect orientation skills and even patterns of memory. Guugu Yimithirr managed all this just in time, before finally going west. The “unadulterated” language that John Haviland started recording from the oldest speakers in the 1970s has now gone the way of all tongues, together with the last members of that generation. While the sounds of Guugu Yimithirr are still heard in Hopevale, the language has undergone drastic simplification under the influence of English. Today’s older speakers still use cardinal directions fairly frequently, at least when they speak Guugu Yimithirr rather than English, but most people younger than fifty have no real grasp of the system.
How many other features of mainstream European languages are there, which we still take as natural and universal even today simply because no one has yet properly understood the languages that do things differently? We may never know. Or put another way, if the prospect of having to make further uncomfortable adaptations to our worldview seems daunting, the good news is that it is getting unlikelier by the minute that we will ever discover such features. Together with Guugu Yimithirr, hundreds of other “tropical languages” are going to the wall, dispersed by the onward march of civilization. The conventional predictions are that within two to three generations at least half the world’s six thousand or so languages will have disappeared, especially those remote tribal tongues that are really different from what seems natural to us. With every year that passes, the notion that all languages do things essentially like English or Spanish is becoming closer to reality. Soon enough, it may be factually correct to argue that the “standard average European” way is the only natural model for human language, because there are no languages that substantially diverge from it. But this will be a hollow truth.
Lest one fall under the impression, however, that it is only remote tribal languages that do things sufficiently strangely to induce noticeable differences in thinking, we shall now explore two areas where significant variation is to be found even among mainstream European languages, and where the influence of language on thought may thus be felt much closer to home.
8
Sex and Syntax
In one of his loveliest but most enigmatic poems, Heinrich Heine describes the yearning of a snowy pine tree for a sunburned Oriental palm. In the original, the poem runs like this:
Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam
Im Norden auf kahler Höh’.
Ihn schläfert; mit weißer Decke
Umhüllen ihn Eis und Schnee.
Er träumt von einer Palme,
Die, fern im Morgenland,
Einsam und schweigend trauert
Auf brennender Felsenwand.
The quiet despair of Heine’s poem must have struck a chord with one of the great melancholics of the Victorian period, the Scottish poet James Thomson (1834–82, not to be confused with the Scottish poet James Thomson, 1700–48, who wrote The Seasons). Thomson was especially admired for his translations, and his rendering remains one of the most oft quoted of the many English versions:
A pine-tree standeth lonely
In the North on an upland bare;
It standeth whitely shrouded
With snow, and sleepeth there.
It dreameth of a Palm Tree
Which far in the East alone,
In mournful silence standeth
On its ridge of burning stone.
With its resonant rhymes and its interlocked alliteration, Thomson’s rendering captures the isolation and the hopeless fixity of the forlorn pine and palm. His adaptation even manages to remain true to Heine’s rhythm while apparently following the meaning of the poem very faithfully. And yet, despite all its artfulness, Thomson’s translation entirely fails to reveal to an English reader a pivotal aspect of the original poem, perhaps the very key to its interpretation. It fails so decidedly because it glosses over one grammatical feature o
f the German language, which happens to be the basis of the whole allegory, and without which Heine’s metaphor is castrated. If you haven’t guessed what that grammatical feature is, the following translation by the American poet Emma Lazarus (1849–87) will make it clearer:
There stands a lonely pine-tree
In the north, on a barren height;
He sleeps while the ice and snow flakes
Swathe him in folds of white.
He dreameth of a palm-tree
Far in the sunrise-land,
Lonely and silent longing
On her burning bank of sand.
In Heine’s original, the pine tree (der Fichtenbaum) is masculine while the palm (die Palme) is feminine, and this opposition of grammatical gender gives the imagery a sexual dimension that is repressed in Thomson’s translation. But many critics believe that the pine tree conceals far more under his folds of white than merely the conventional romantic lament of unrequited love, and that the palm may be the object of an altogether different kind of desire. There is a tradition of Jewish love poems addressed to the distant and unattainable Jerusalem, which is always personified as a female beloved. This genre goes all the way back to one of Heine’s favorite psalms: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion. . . . If I forget thee [feminine], O Jerusalem, may my right hand wither, may my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth.” Heine may be alluding to this tradition, and his lonely palm on her ridge of burning stone may be a coded reference to the deserted Jerusalem, perched high up in the Judaean hills. More specifically, Heine’s lines may be alluding to the most famous of all odes to Jerusalem, written in twelfth-century Spain by Yehuda Halevy, a poet whom Heine revered. The pine tree’s object of desire “far in the East” may be echoing Halevy’s opening line, “My heart is in the East, and I am in the farthest West.”
Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages Page 21