A friend forwarded this article to me. Here's the link -- but it's
pay-per-view:
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=S%27%298%20%2ERA%27
%22%23%40%23L%0A
Comments?
BABEL'S CHILDREN
January 8th 2004
The Economist
Languages may be more different from each other than is currently
supposed. That may affect the way people think
IT IS hard to conceive of a language without nouns or verbs. But that
is just what Riau Indonesian is, according to David Gil, a researcher
at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig.
Dr Gil has been studying Riau for the past 12 years. Initially, he
says, he struggled with the language, despite being fluent in standard
Indonesian. However, a breakthrough came when he realised that what he
had been thinking of as different parts of speech were, in fact,
grammatically the same. For example, the phrase "the chicken is eating"
translates into colloquial Riau as "ayam makan". Literally, this is
"chicken eat". But the same pair of words also have meanings as diverse
as "the chicken is making somebody eat", or "somebody is eating where
the chicken is". There are, he says, no modifiers that distinguish the
tenses of verbs. Nor are there modifiers for nouns that distinguish the
definite from the indefinite ("the", as opposed to "a"). Indeed, there
are no features in Riau Indonesian that distinguish nouns from verbs.
These categories, he says, are imposed because the languages that
western linguists are familiar with have them.
This sort of observation flies in the face of conventional wisdom about
what language is. Most linguists are influenced by the work of Noam
Chomsky--in particular, his theory of "deep grammar". According to Dr
Chomsky, people are born with a sort of linguistic template in their
brains. This is a set of rules that allows children to learn a language
quickly, but also imposes constraints and structure on what is learnt.
Evidence in support of this theory includes the tendency of children to
make systematic mistakes which indicate a tendency to impose rules on
what turn out to be grammatical exceptions (eg, "I dided it" instead of
"I did it"). There is also the ability of the children of migrant
workers to invent new languages known as creoles out of the
grammatically incoherent pidgin spoken by their parents. Exactly what
the deep grammar consists of is still not clear, but a basic
distinction between nouns and verbs would probably be one of its
minimum requirements.
PLUMBING THE GRAMMATICAL DEPTHS
Dr Gil contends, however, that there is a risk of unconscious bias
leading to the conclusion that a particular sort of grammar exists in
an unfamiliar language. That is because it is easier for linguists to
discover extra features in foreign languages--for example tones that
change the meaning of words, which are common in Indonesian but do not
exist in European languages--than to realise that elements which are
taken for granted in a linguist's native language may be absent from
another. Despite the best intentions, he says, there is a tendency to
fit languages into a mould. And since most linguists are westerners,
that mould is usually an Indo-European language from the West.
It need not, however, be a modern language. Dr Gil's point about bias
is well illustrated by the history of the study of the world's most
widely spoken tongue. Many of the people who developed modern
linguistics had had an education in Latin and Greek. As a consequence,
English was often described until well into the 20th century as having
six different noun cases, because Latin has six. (A noun case is how
that noun's grammatical use is distinguished, for example as a subject
or as an object.) Only relatively recently did grammarians begin a
debate over noun cases in English. Some now contend that it does not
have noun cases at all, others that it has two (one for the possessive,
the other for everything else) while still others maintain that there
are three or four cases. These would include the nominative (for the
subject of a sentence), the accusative (for its object) and the
genitive (to indicate possession).
The difficulty is compounded if a linguist is not fluent in the
language he is studying. The process of linguistic fieldwork is a
painstaking one, fraught with pitfalls. Its mainstay is the use of
"informants" who tell linguists, in interviews and on paper, about
their language. Unfortunately, these informants tend to be
better-educated than their fellows, and are often fluent in more than
one language. This, in conjunction with the comparatively formal
setting of an interview (even if it is done in as basic a location as
possible), can systematically distort the results. While such
interviews are an unavoidable, and essential, part of the process, Dr
Gil has also resorted to various ruses in his attempts to elicit
linguistic information. In one of them, he would sit by the ferry
terminal on Batam, an Indonesian island near Singapore, with sketches
of fish doing different things. He then struck up conversations with
shoeshine boys hanging around the dock, hoping that the boys would
describe what the fish were doing in a relaxed, colloquial manner.
The experiment, though, was not entirely successful: when the boys
realised his intention, they began to speak more formally. This
experience, says Dr Gil, illustrates the difficulties of collecting
authentic information about the ways in which people speak. But those
differences, whether or not they reflect the absence of a Chomskian
deep grammar, might be relevant not just to language, but to the very
way in which people think.
WORD, WORDS, WORDS
A project that Dr Gil is just beginning in Indonesia, in collaboration
with Lera Boroditsky, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, is examining correlations between the way concepts are
expressed in languages and how native speakers of these languages
think. This is a test of a hypothesis first made by Benjamin Lee Whorf,
an early 20th-century American linguist, that the structure of language
affects the way people think. Though Whorf's hypothesis fell into
disfavour half a century ago, it is now undergoing something of a
revival.
Dr Boroditsky's experiment is simple. People are shown three pictures,
one of a man about to kick a ball, one of the same man having just
kicked a ball, and a third of a different man who is about to kick a
ball. They are then asked which two of the three are the most similar.
Indonesians generally choose the first two pictures, which have the
same man in them, while English speakers are likely to identify the two
pictures that show the ball about to be kicked--an emphasis on the
temporal, rather than the spatial, relationship between the principal
objects in the picture.
Dr Gil believes that this might be because time is, in English, an
integral grammatical concept--every verb must have a tense, be it past,
present or future. By contrast, in Indonesian, expressing a verb's
tense is optional, and not always done. In support of Whorf's idea, Dr
Gil half-jokingly cites the fact that Indonesians always seem to be
running late. But there is more systematic evidence, too. For example,
native Indonesian speakers who also speak English fall between the two
groups of monoglots in the experiment. Dr Gil supposes that their
thought processes are influenced by their knowledge of both English and
Indonesian grammar.
Demonstrating any sort of causal link would, nevertheless, be hard.
Indeed, the first challenge the researchers must surmount if they are
to prove Whorf correct is to show that English and Indonesian speakers
do, in fact, think differently about time, and are not answering
questions in different ways for some other reason. If that does prove
to be the case, says Dr Gil, their remains the thorny question of
whether it is the differences in language of the two groups that
influences their conception of time, or vice versa.
Dr Boroditsky and Dr Gil are not intending to restrict their study to
ideas about time. They plan, for example, to study gender. English,
unlike many other languages, does not assign genders to most nouns.
Does this affect the way English-speakers think of gender? Languages
also differ in the ways they distinguish between singular and plural
nouns. Indeed, some do not distinguish at all, while others have a
special case, called the dual, that refers only to a pair of something.
Descriptions of spatial relations, too, vary, with languages dividing
the world up differently by using different sorts of prepositions. The
notion that grammar might affect the way people think may seem
far-fetched, and even unappealing to those who are confident of their
own free will. But if Dr Gil is right and there do exist languages,
like Riau Indonesian, without nouns or verbs, the difficulty of
conceiving just that fact points out how much grammar itself shapes at
least some thoughts
=====================================================
Denis M. Donovan, M.D., M.Ed., F.A.P.S.
The Children's Center for Developmental Psychiatry
6675 - 13th Avenue North, Suite 2-A
St. Petersburg, Florida 33710-5483
Phone: 727-345-2400
FAX: 727-345-8808
Email: dmdonvan@ix.netcom.com
=====================================================
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