The curse of Babel continued to bedevil our household. A friend of Olivier’s, a parisienne who worked in fashion PR, was coming to visit us in Geneva. I spent days planning the menu, requisitioning the best lamb, stuffing the lamb with saffron rice, stressing out over which pâtisserie I’d go to for tiny tartes and fondants. (The how-to-be-a-French-person guides I’d read the year before assured me that store-bought desserts were totally acceptable.)
The dinner came off well. The meat was tender. I served the salad as a palate cleanser, in the French way, and after that, a selection of cheeses of different textures, levels of pungency, and varieties of milk. The desserts were a hit. Once we’d lingered a while at the table, we moved to the living room, where we lit a fire and watched as the flames pulled like taffy toward the flue.
For my benefit, we spoke in English. Christine, Olivier’s friend, was complaining about some British colleagues.
“‘Hey, lads,’ it makes me insane,” Olivier joined in.
I listened as it became clear that my dinner partners believed that a group they called “Anglo-Saxons”—comprising a culture that united Britain, its commonwealths, and former colonies—were engaged in some sort of global conspiracy.
France, Britain, and America: what a love triangle. I was reminded of a letter I’d seen in a museum exhibit, an internal memo that went around the British Foreign Office in 1941. “We are regarded as a cold-blooded, calculating people, and our failure to show warmth—to ‘say it with flowers’—is perhaps the main reason why American respect for us never quite ripens into a warm, uncalculating friendship—such as they have felt for the French,” it read. “If we could, for once in our lives, shed our caution and offer our most precious possession to our best friends, then the effect would be incalculable, both to-day and in the future.” The writer wanted to make a permanent gift to the American people of the Lincoln Cathedral’s Magna Carta, which had been a sensation at the New York World’s Fair. Being an American, I had found the “for once in our lives” so poignant, suggestive in its mustachioed primness of a bureaucrat who, sensing the end of days, has finally worked up the nerve to cut in on a dance. I read on. Being an American, I had been had. The bureaucrat, in the last line of the letter, said it with mordant superiority: “And, after all, we possess four copies of Magna Carta.”
“Just look at the list of countries the NSA spies on,” Olivier was saying. “It’s only Anglo-Saxons that the US trusts.”
“How exactly does India fit into this scheme?” I asked.
He and Christine looked at each other as though the answer were too obvious to be worth articulating.
“South Africa?” I continued.
“Americans don’t like to be reminded that they were part of an empire, do they?” one of them said.
Having had enough, I got up, slammed the door, not very chicly, and went to bed.
• • •
SCHNAPSIDEE—the way a German would describe a plan he’d hatched under the influence of alcohol. Pilkunnussija—Finnish for “comma fucker,” a grammar pedant. In Mundari, ribuy-tibuy refers to the sight, sound, and motion of a fat person’s buttocks. Jayus, in Indonesian, denotes a joke told so poorly that people can’t help but laugh. Knullrufs is Swedish for postsex hair. Gumusservi means moonlight shining on the water in Turkish. Culaccino is the Italian word for the mark left on a table by a cold glass.
Words like these are marvelous. We make lists of them, compile them into treasuries, trade them over any dinner table at which holders of more than one passport have convened. (The German, armed with Kummerspeck—“grief bacon”—will always win the day.) They’re fun to say. They’re funny to think about, in their Seinfeldian particularity. They expand and concentrate the world, making it bigger-spirited while at the same time more specific.
We like to think that the lexicon of a language reveals broad truths about its speakers. The wine will flow, and the Japanese guest will mention komorebi, the sunlight filtering through the leaves of trees, and the Frenchman will offer l’appel du vide, the urge to jump off the side of a cliff, and there will be collective acknowledgment of the aesthetic qualities of the Japanese, and the nihilistic ones of the French. But the idea that untranslatable words prove that speakers of different languages experience the world in radically different ways is as dubious as it is popular, originating from “the great Eskimo vocabulary hoax”—the notion that Eskimo has fifty or eighty or a hundred words for snow.
Eskimo is not a language but a group of them, comprising the Inuit and Yupik families, spoken from Greenland to Siberia. Nor, as the linguist Geoffrey Pullum explains, are they actually especially rich in snow terminology. What they are rich in is suffixes, which allow their speakers to build endless variations upon a small base of root words. (If you’re tallying derivations, Eskimos also have a multitude of words for “sun.”) Sticking strictly to lexemes, or minimal meaningful units of language, Anthony C. Woodbury has cataloged about fifteen distinct snow words in one Eskimo language, Central Alaskan Yupik—roughly the same number as there are in English. A cartoon, mocking our credulity, features two Eskimos. One asks the other, “Did you know that in Hampstead”—a neighborhood in North London—“they have twenty words for bread?”
Even if Eskimos did possess a voluminous vocabulary for snow, or Hampsteaders for bread, it wouldn’t prove that they were subject to some separate reality, that their language sliced up the world into mutually unavailable porterhouses and araignées. Lepidopterists have names for the behavior that butterflies exhibit at damp spots (puddling) and for the opening of the silk gland found on the caterpillar’s lower lip (spinneret). Architects can distinguish between arrowslits, bartizans, and spandrels, while pilots speak of upwash and adverse yaw. New words are created every day by people who are able to comprehend their meanings before they exist. Novel language can be a function of time as well as space. Czech speakers came up with prozvonit—the act of calling a cell phone and hanging up after one ring so that the other person will call you back, saving you money—because cell phones were invented, not because they were Czech. Even if languages express certain concepts more artfully, or more succinctly, it’s precisely because we recognize the phenomena to which they refer that we’re delighted by knullrufs and Kummerspeck.
A language carries within it a culture, or cultures: ways of thinking and being. With the exception of Olivier, I spoke American English with the people to whom I was closest, who spoke American English back to me. For most of my life, I had assumed that Americanness agreed with me, because I had never questioned it. My alienations were localized, smaller-bore. In North Carolina, I craved the immensity of New York. In New York, I longed for the intimacy of North Carolina. It wasn’t that I didn’t like either culture. I loved them both. But my family’s trajectory over the course of three generations—north, south, and north again, a chevron of opportunity and discontent—had left me feeling that I could claim neither place as fully my own. In one, I was an arriviste; in the other, some part of me would always be a bumpkin, marveling at the existence of “doorman buildings” and thinking the phrase “plus one” a little mean. In ways, I felt that I had already learned a new language, “picked it up,” like Zadie Smith, “in college, along with the unabridged Clarissa and a taste for port.”
“Why do people want to adopt another culture?” Alice Kaplan, the French scholar, writes. “Because there’s something in their own they don’t like, that doesn’t name them.” For me, French wasn’t an uncomplicated refuge. I was coming at the language, I think, from the opposite angle to Kaplan: I had accidentally become the proprietor of a life suffused by French, and for all its charms, there was something I didn’t like in it.
In French the grid was divided differently, between public and private, rather than polite and rude. At first I felt its emphasis on discrimination, its relentless taxonomizing, as an almost ethical defect. French—the language and the culture—was s
o doctrinaire, so hung up on questions of form. The necessity of classifying each person one came across as vous or tu, outsider or insider, potential foe or friend, seemed at best a pomposity and at worst an act of paranoia. The easy egalitarianism of English tingled like a phantom limb. French could feel as “old and cold and settled in its ways” a place to live as Joni Mitchell’s Paris. One day I bought a package of twenty assiettes pour grillades and ached for America, where you could use your large white paper plates for whatever the hell you wanted.
Like Mark Twain—who translated one of his stories from French back into English, to produce the thrice-baked “The Frog Jumping of the County of Calaveras”—I found the language comically unwieldy. In its reluctance to disobey itself, it often seemed effete. One French newspaper had a column that recapitulated the best tweets of the week in more characters than they took to write. The biggest ridiculousism I ever came across was “dinde gigogne composée d’une dinde partiellement désossée, farcie d’un canard partiellement désossé, lui-même farci d’un poulet partiellement désossé”—that is to say, turducken.
Even if muruaneq—Yupik word for soft, deep fallen snow—was basically powder, the question tantalized me: Does each language have its own worldview? Do people have different personalities in different languages? Every exchange student and maker of New Year’s resolutions hopes that the answer is yes. More than any juice cleanse or lottery win or career switch, a foreign language adumbrates a vision of a parallel life. The fantasy is that learning one activates a latent alter ego, righting a linguistic version of having been switched at birth. Could I, would I, become someone else if I spoke French?
• • •
THE ACADEMY IS VICIOUSLY SPLIT on the question of whether one’s language shapes one’s worldview. The debate examines language at the structural level, seeking to determine whether the distinctions that each one obliges its speakers to make—what they must say, rather than what they may say—result in differences in memory, perception, and practical skills. So far, no one can definitively say whether Montaigne’s parents were onto something in insisting that he be brought up in Latin, so that he could learn to think like the ancients. Depending on whom you ask, languages are either prescription glasses (changing the way you see the world) or vanity contact lenses (basically negligible). As one of the major unsolved mysteries of human cognition, the subject inspires theories as impassioned as they are irreconcilable.
Linguistic relativism—the idea that languages possess and inculcate different ways of thinking—gained purchase in the eighteenth century, spreading from the Romantics in France to their counterparts in Germany. As critics of the Enlightenment, the Romantics expressed a preference for the emotional, local, and subjective by adopting the creed of nationalism, which held that the state’s legitimacy rested in the unity of the people it governed. Nationalism, in their reckoning, was a means of spiritual renewal. Language was the font of national identity. “One of the most interesting inquiries into the history and manifold characteristics of the human understanding and heart would be found in a philosophical comparison of languages; since on each of these the mind and character of a people are strongly impressed,” Johann Gottfried Herder wrote, adding, “The genius of a people is nowhere more decisively indicated than in the physiognomy of its speech.” Like phrenologists measuring skulls, the Romantics sought to extrapolate the characters of peoples from their linguistic contours.
At Columbia in the early twentieth century, the anthropologist Franz Boas revived the Romantic interest in the diversity of languages, laying the foundations for linguistic relativism’s modern form. (It was Boas, in fact, who first mentioned Eskimos and snow.) His protégé Edward Sapir went on to become a seminal figure in the foundation of the field of linguistics, producing studies of such languages as Nootka, Sarcee, and Chinook. “The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group,” he wrote. “No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality.”
Sapir trained Benjamin Lee Whorf, as strange and poignant a figure as American intellectual life has ever produced. Whorf was born in 1897 in Winthrop, Massachusetts. After an undistinguished undergraduate career in the chemical engineering department at MIT, he became a fire prevention inspector with the Hartford Fire Insurance Company, specializing in the underwriting of buildings with automatic sprinklers. Whorf was a Methodist, of English stock. During a crisis of faith, he became interested in Jewish mysticism, particularly as manifested by the Hebrew alphabet, which occultists had for centuries picked apart and spun around and recombined, believing it to hold the secret to man’s original tongue. In 1926 Whorf added Aztec to his self-imposed, self-taught curriculum. In 1928 he took up Mayan. His quest to unearth the lost meanings of letters, to rediscover a linguistic city of gold, obsessed him to the point that his friends complained that he passed them by in the street, offering no sign of recognition. Appearing at the Twenty-Third International Congress of Americanists, seemingly out of nowhere, he dazzled the establishment with a translation of an Aztec manuscript long held to be impenetrable. On its strength, he received a grant to pursue his research in Mexico. The fire insurance company, the Hartford Courant noted, agreed to grant him a leave of absence.
Passing his days at smelting plants and tanneries, Whorf worked his way into New England’s elite intellectual circles, enrolling in Sapir’s graduate seminar in American Indian linguistics at Yale. (His younger brother, Richard, moved to California and eventually directed The Beverly Hillbillies.) In 1940 he announced an attention-getting discovery: the Hopi language, he said, had no linear sense of time. He based this claim on several peculiarities of Hopi grammar, including the fact that its verbs did not indicate past, present, and future tense, per se. Rather, they marked validity, so that “He ran” would be rendered in Hopi as either “Wari” (running, a statement of fact) or “Era wari” (running, a statement of fact from memory). Presenting his findings as “the linguistic relativity principle,” Whorf heralded a “new physics,” in which speakers of different languages were compelled by their grammars to different experiences of externally identical phenomena. “We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages,” he wrote.
Whorf died of cancer the next year, at the age of forty-four. In the decades to follow, some of his ideas were proven to be incorrect or overstated—among them the Hopi concept of time—but even the most prescient were vulnerable to distortion. In the 1950s the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,” stripped of its original subtleties, became shorthand for a sort of brute conflation of speech and thought. A shelter under which various canards about language congregated, it was marked for demolition by the 1960s, when Noam Chomsky and his theory of universal grammar came along.
Language, according to Chomsky, is a biological instinct. We are each equipped with a grammatical toolkit; all we have to do to start building is to be born a human being. In Chomsky’s view, speech is as independent of culture as breathing or walking. The differences among languages are so trivial that each one of the seven thousand tongues spoken on earth would register as a mere dialect to a visitor from Mars. Rendered in a mathematical logic that cared little for igloos or clocks, Chomsky’s ideas were revolutionary, and then they were consensual. By 1994, when the Harvard psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker published The Language Instinct, an “obituary” for the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the concept of linguistic relativity had taken on an air of disrepute and even infamy.
People know how to speak like spiders know how to spin webs, Pinker argued, drawing much of his evidence from studies of the extraordinary abilities of children to acquire language without formal instruction. “The idea that thought is the same thing as language,” he asserted, “is an example of what can be called a conventional absurdity: a statement that goes against all common sense but that everyone believes because they dimly recall havin
g heard it somewhere and because it is so pregnant with implications.” The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, even if he had rather distorted it, was to Pinker a crock, a folk belief of the same dim hordes who took it as fact that lemmings commit mass suicide and the Boy Scout Manual is the world’s best-selling book. Benjamin Lee Whorf, one scholar wrote, had undergone a demotion from unlikely hero to one of “the prime whipping boys of introductory texts on linguistics.”
• • •
THE ACADÉMIE FRANÇAISE s’en branle about Noam Chomsky. (In French you don’t say “could give a rat’s ass,” you say “jerk yourself off.”) Founded in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu to “clean the language of all the filth it has contracted,” the academy is the high authority on questions of what is or is not French. Richelieu modeled the institution on private clubs of language lovers that gathered at the Hôtel de Rambouillet. Today, its forty members are novelists, poets, philosophers, journalists, historians, doctors, attorneys, biologists, clergymen, and politicians. They are elected for life. In order to gain admittance, they must apply to fill a specific seat, whose previous holder they eulogize in a public speech.
Voltaire, Victor Hugo, and Louis Pasteur were academicians, as have been five heads of state, including Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the president of the French Republic from 1974 to 1981, who currently occupies seat 16. Baudelaire, however, was excluded on moral grounds; Moliere was snubbed for being an actor; Zola applied twenty-four times and was rejected on each. “Willy-nilly, in the twenty-first century as in the eighteenth, anyone who wants to shake off the leaden cloak of conformism and mass communication, anyone who discovers that he wants before dying to participate in a civilized conversation, the image on this earth of nostra conversatio quae est in coelis, does so in French,” the academician Marc Fumaroli has written (at least according to his translator, whose decision to use “willy-nilly” rather than “whether one likes it or not” provokes curiosity). The academy’s motto: à l’immortalité. The notion that language is universal is about as plausible in its cosmology as a Champagne from Belize.
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