Language as Mirror and Prism

Language as Mirror and Prism

If one had to pick a single attribute that defines us as human, our ability to talk to each other must surely be among the top choices. Certainly there is our opposable human thumb and our use of sophisticated tools, and these would also be possible choices. But most people can imagine a world in which they had to recreate all of the tools that they need. And certainly there are thousands upon thousands of individuals who are missing one or both thumbs (or hands) and are still essentially human. But if one were to find oneself suddenly without language (or without another person to speak to) what would this feel like? Would it not be as if one had been hollowed out? As if one's essential humanity scooped away? In the folktales of the world, even ghosts can still speak. For what kind of afterlife could follow this life that would not be made terrible by the loss of words?

And yet, despite the centrality of language to our understanding of what it means to be human (as well as what it means to be a member of a culture), we tend to accept language with relatively little curiosity. It is like air and gravity, both vital and yet fundamentally invisible. We are not inclined to ask where language comes from or how it shapes us.

Reading the work of Franz Boas on language and its connections to race as it was understood and parsed at the time alongside Benjamin Lee Whorf's model of the ways in which reality is created, influenced, reified, experienced, and recreated through the syntax and grammar of our first language(s) is a revelatory experience. This is true not in the least because it requires one to question the most basic ideas about language. Does one come into the world programmed to speak? How much difference does language make to our understanding of ourselves as human -- and how central was it to our evolution as a species? Does the language we speak influence the way we see the world? Does it do more than influence it? How would this process work if one is bilingual? This paper explores two essays, one by each scholar, first presenting a summary and assessment of each separately and then looking at the two in conjunction with each other.

Franz Boas: Race and Language

Boas did not begin as an anthropologist. Indeed, beginning in the discipline that he would eventually be most closely connected with was not an option available to him as it was not yet established as a fully recognized discipline in the second half of the nineteenth century. Thus his own intellectual career began in the hard sciences -- in physics -- before shifting to geography and then anthropology. It is important to remember the hard science background of Boas's work because there are fundamentally scientific principles running through his work.

Boas became involved in the evolutionary debates of his time (Herbert, 2001, p. 382). He was familiar with both Darwin's theory of evolution and Lamarck's model of evolution. Neither theory was at the time entirely satisfying, since Darwin (lacking the genetic knowledge that the twentieth century would bring to scientists) could not explain the mechanism of inheritance (and thus of natural selection) and Lamarck's idea that traits acquired during an individual's lifetime could be passed along to offspring was also intellectually weak.

Of the two models, however, Boas favored Darwin's. He was attracted to the idea that all humans were bound together, that as a species we are all fundamentally connected to each other. He saw cultural and thus linguistic variations as much less important than the unified, universal origin that we all share as humans (Herbert, 2001, p. 384). In presenting his writings on different peoples, different cultures, and different languages, however, Boas was to some extent caught between his beliefs about the unity of humanity and contemporary ideas about race that transformed the cultural distinctions of race into purely biological ones. As he writes in the introduction to The Handbook of American Indian Languages:

When Columbus started on his journey to reach the Indies, sailing westward, and discovered the shores of America, he beheld a new race of man, different in type, different in culture, different in language, from any known before that time. This race resembled neither the European types, nor the negroes, nor the better-known races of southern Asia. As the Spanish conquest of America pro- gressed, other peoples of our continent became known to the invaders, and all showed a certain degree of outer resemblance, which led the Spaniards to designate them by the term "Indios" (Indians), the inhabitants of the country which was believed to be part of India. Thus the mistaken geographical term came to be applied to the inhabitants of the New World; and owing to the contrast of their appearance to that of other races, and the peculiarities of their cultures and their languages, they came to be in time considered as a racial unit.

For Boas, humanity was both fundamentally unified and fundamentally differentiated, which is certainly a fair understanding of the connections and discontinuities among different human populations. And while his understanding of race may seem overly simplified (and in many ways suspect) from the advantage of the twenty-first century, Boas himself clearly struggled to come to a more sophisticated understanding of the ways in which physical appearance and cultural attributes were related to each other.

It is hard for us to fathom this, but a number of scholars of Boas's time argued that there was a one-to-one correlation between physical form (primarily skin color, but also other attributes such as hair color and texture), cultural forms, and linguistic forms. The following (also from the Introduction to the Handbook) describes the then-common attitudes about the connections between race and language:

The most typical attempt to classify mankind from a consideration of both anatomical and linguistic points-of-view is that of Friederich Muller, who takes as the basis of his primary divisions the form of hair, while all the minor divisions are based on linguistic considerations.

This is such a bizarre understanding of the connections between race and language that it is a great relief that Boas immediately goes on to reject it. History, he argues, is replete with examples of people who change language without changing physical type. Italians look remarkably like their Roman ancestors, even though Italian is clearly distinct as a language from Latin. American blacks of the time looked very similar to their African forebears, but they spoke English or French like their white neighbors.

In making this distinctions between race and language, Boas was actually remarking on the exact same distinction that exists between Darwinian and Lamarkian evolutionary models, although Boas himself does not make this explicit in these terms. But he does clearly understand that some traits (like skin color) are biological and inherited (thus siding with Darwin) and that others (like language) are learned from the people with whom one grows up (Herbert, 2001, p. 386).

If this is true [that there is no one-to-one correlation between race and language), then it is obvious that attempts to classify mankind, based on the present distribution of type, language, and culture, must lead to different results, according to the point-of-view taken; that a classification based primarily on type alone will lead to a system which represents, more or less accurately, the blood relationships of the people, which do not need to coincide with their cultural relationships; and that, in the same way, classifications based on language and culture do not need at all to coincide with a biological classification.

Another way of expressing this is that race is (while in many ways a cultural construct) biological and genetic in the sense that skin color is inherited. We know this now, just as Darwin knew it to be true even before Watson and Crick. But culture, including language, can legitimately be seen as being passed on in Lamarckian fashion: Language is an acquired trait that we can pass on to our offspring.

In other words, Boas's understanding of the ways in which biological inheritance (especially vis-a-vis race) is different from cultural transmission is an educated, reasonable one that we find to be still perfectly serviceable today. However, later in the Handbook he demonstrates how different his concept of race and its relationship to language is from both Whorf's and current scholarship. Like Whorf, Boas believes that there is a connection between thought and language, but Boas also believes that the American Indian languages that he is writing about are inferior to languages like English -- and they are inferior because of the brains of the Indians.

He writes:

First of all, it may be well to discuss the relation between language and thought. It has been claimed that the conciseness and clearness of thought of a people depend to a great extent upon their language.

The ease with which in our modem European languages we express wide abstract ideas by a single term, and the facility with which wide generalizations are cast into the frame of a simple sentence, have been claimed to be one of the fundamental conditions of the clearness of our concepts, the logical force of our thought, and the precision with which we eliminate in our thoughts irrelevant details. Apparently this view has much in its favor.

When we compare modern English with some of those Indian languages which are most concrete in their formative expression, the contrast is striking. When we say "The eye is the organ of sight, the Indian may not be able to form the expression the eye, but may have to define that the eye of a person or of an animal is meant. Neither may the Indian be able to generalize readily the abstract idea of an eye as the representative of the whole class of objects... (p. 64).

It does not seem to occur to Boas anywhere in the Handbook that such a way of talking about the world might not arise because the mind of the American Indians that he is writing about is "primitive" but rather because he or she is seeing the world in a very different way.

Boas would no doubt have argued that this is only a single truth, one that can be measured and experienced and agreed upon by reasonable men. (And, perhaps, some women.) But the idea that culture, and specifically language, actively shapes what we see in the world does not enter into his model. Indians speak differently from you and me, he argues, because they are primitive, simple people who do not have to bother themselves overly with abstract thoughts. That their world might be more complex than his own is not an idea that Boas considers. Moreover, even as he has rejected the idea that language is based in the biology of race, he teeters on the edge of believing that there is a connection between the degree of "primitiveness" and race as defined as biological.

The Ordinary Everyday Analysis of Phenomena

Benjamin Lee Whorf along with his colleague Edward Sapir has been generally discredited. His argument that language is a powerful force in shaping our reality is generally considered to have been dethroned by modern theories about universal grammars promulgated by Noam Chomsky and his followers. Although the topic of universal grammar is certainly not central to this paper, it is worth touching on briefly, because Chomsky's model of language has brought scholars back (although it is quite possible that they would not themselves admit it) to a view that contains many Boasian elements. By looking very briefly at the work of Chomsky, it is thus possible to come to a clearer understanding of the ways in which Whorf himself understands how language and reality are connected.

Chomsky argues that all humans come into the world with a universal grammar embedded in our neurological circuits (Chomsky, 1965). The wiring, interchangeable with every other person, is tweaked by the language(s) that each one of us speaks. But language is as universal to humans as is DNA, and its basis in genetics ensures that no matter whether we are speaking Ainu or Zulu, we are speaking about the same reality.

Whorf believed in a profoundly different relationship between language and reality. He opens the 1939 essay "The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language" with a clear statement of his basic belief that language shapes our world:

There will probably be general assent to the proposition that an accepted pattern of using words is often prior to certain lines of thinking who assents often sees in such a statement nothing more than a platitudinous recognition of the hypnotic terminology on the one hand or of power of philosophical and learned catchwords, slogans, and rallying cries on the other. To see only thus far is to miss the point of one of the important interconnections which Sapir saw between language, culture, and psychology, and succinctly expressed in the introductory quotation. It is not so much in these special uses of language as in its constant ways of arranging data and its most ordinary everyday analysis of phenomena that we need to recognize the influence it has on other activities, cultural and personal. (p. 75).

To appreciate the strength of his belief in the guiding influence of language in terms of our experiences in the world, it is necessary to include the Sapir quote to which he is referring and with which he opens the essay:

Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. 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. We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation (p. 75).

In other words, Whorf is arguing that reality is defined and experienced not by what we all share as humans such as the biophysics of our eyes and ears and nerve-endings but by the specific categories of our language. Neither species (as Boas would argue) nor race (as many nineteenth-century scholars of language would argue) are the greatest influences in determining our reality. Rather, our language is. And so five people from five different races all speaking the same language -- whether Navajo or Etruscan or anything else -- will share a reality.

This is a peculiar thought the first time that one comes upon it, and it is easy to see why it fell by the wayside. It is also possible that Whorf overstated his case, and it probably has not helped his cause that his own writing style tends towards the arcane. But his argument that language is a mold for reality seems to me to be a highly compelling one. His own examples in this essay, in which he contrasts Standard American English (or SAE) and Hopi are themselves quite convincing.

At the end of the essay he summarizes the basic differences between the two languages:

The SAE microcosm has analyzed reality largely in terms of what it calls "things" (bodies and quasibodies) plus modes of extensional but formless existence that it calls "substances" or "matter." It tends to see existence through a binomial formula that expresses any existent as a spatial form plus a spatial formless continuum related to the form, as contents is related to the outlines of its container. Nonspatial existents are imaginatively spatialized and charged with similar implications of form and continuum.

The Hopi microcosm seems to have analyzed reality largely in terms Of EVENTS (or better "eventing"), referred to in two ways, objective and subjective. Objectively, and only if perceptible physical experience, events are expressed mainly as outlines, colors, movements, and other perceptive reports. Subjectively, for both the physical and nonphysical, events are considered the expression of invisible intensity factors, on which depend their stability and persistence, or their fugitiveness and proclivities. It implies that existents do not "become later and later" all in the same way; but some do so by growing like plants, some by diffusing and vanishing, some by a procession of metamorphoses, some by enduring in one shape till affected by violent forces. In the nature of each existent able to manifest as a definite whole is the power of its own mode of duration: its growth, decline, stability, cyclicity, or creativeness. Everything is thus already "prepared" for the way it now manifests by earlier phases, and what it will be later, partly has been, and partly is in act of being so "prepared." An emphasis and importance rests on this preparing or being prepared aspect of the world that may to the Hopi correspond to that "quality of reality" that "matter" or "stuff" has for us.

This explanation of the differences between the native speaker of Hopi and the native speaker of English seems quite compelling. It is important to emphasize here that the differences that Whorf is talking about are not superficial ones, not a question of vocabulary, for example.