Chained by language, freed by language

Back in the central decades of the last century there was a fairly robust current in linguistics which proposed that the language we speak determines the kind of thought we have and limits the cognitive categories we can handle. This was known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that I discussed last winter, but has long been disproved. Its weak version states that our language influences the way we think and that is much harder to disprove: in fact, speakers of languages in which inanimate objects have a grammatical gender, such as German or Spanish tend to assign "masculine" or "feminine" qualities to the objects (regardless of the fact that the same object can be masculine in one language and feminine in the other, such as the moon, masculine in German, but feminine in Spanish, or a clock, just the other way around). This tendency does not limit the speakers' ability to understand the concepts, but primes certain judgment calls that are not present in the speakers of gender-less languages.

One of the most admirable properties of languages is the ability to forge new words, either by adopting and adapting a foreign term or by composition or derivation of previous ones. Importing terminology is rather simple, since it is already established in the language of a nearby country, but inventing new terms is frequently the source of endless misunderstandings and frequent hilarity. For instance, the proto-Germanic tribes were afraid of saying the original word for bear, arktos, for fear that this could invoke the beast with all the harm that it brought, so they started to call it "the brown one", which later evolved in the modern term. But I can easily imagine repeated discussions about which one of the many "brown things" you might be talking about when the subject came about.

Photo: Alan Levine

In most cases, language have means to allow us describing objects and events even in the case we do not know the actual word. If you do not know the word for "rain" you can always mention "water falling from the sky" or "the phenomenon that happened yesterday afternoon". This explanatory capabilities provide a great freedom, since it allows us to express ourselves even in the absence of a very rich vocabulary, as the XKCD comic does when explaining the Saturn V rocket with the ten hundred most common words of English. However, there is no discussion that explanation, requiring many more words and possibly complex grammatical structures, is significantly less efficient than denotation, which provides a very clear identification is just a word or two.

However there is a surprising a very frustrating property in our knowledge of words: it is very asymmetrical. The number of words we can understand when we hear it or read it, and the speed with which we identify it is normally much greater than our ability to conjure that word when we are trying to speak. Furthermore, we often know that we know the word, but we are just unable to find it. In some sense, the availability of words is similar to a sedimentation process, where using a word will bring it back to the surface and make it very present for future uses, but as time passes without an occasion to uses, the word sinks to the bottom of our memory and it becomes less and less available.

This is probably the background for the situation described by American journalist Jenny Liao in this article for The New Yorker: while she spoke exclusively Cantonese all the way up to age six, the moment she entered school she started to replace it with more and more frequent use of English to the point that she has now at age 38 forgotten most of the Cantonese words that she used to know and is unable to speak to her parents without the aid of a translation app. (How someone can live thirty something years in a country and still speak only a foreign language eludes me, but that is a different story.) Re-interpreting the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the language we speak does certainly limit with whom we can talk, and when the barrier prevents you from reaching out to your family it is certainly worrisome.

Humans are social animals and as such we need to live within our groups (families, tribes, cities). Language is an extremely efficient way to coordinate the group effort and transmit our point of view, providing great freedom to act even in the face of adverse environmental circumstances. However, a minimum command of the language is necessary to move about meaningfully. Otherwise, our lack of understanding and expression can easily become a prison, that deprives us of the freedom to choose and leaves us at the mercy of others. Being (as you have probably already guessed if you have followed the blog for a little while) a non-native English speaker I can only attest to the power that languages have to open doors, and the better our proficiency the higher the doors that become open. What is your experience with languages (native or foreign)? Please comment below if you wish, and otherwise just have a nice evening.