by OLIVER KAMM
Is this pond light or dark blue? Russian speakers know best
In his book The Second World War, Winston Churchill suggested that one reason for Japan’s disastrous defeat at the Battle of Midway was the cumbersome nature of the Japanese language.
This wasn’t among Churchill’s wiser pronouncements, yet the idea underlying it is widely held — that the language we speak shapes the way we see the world. It’s a seductive and influential view. In this succinct, accessible and engaging book, McWhorter looks at the evidence and concludes that this popular idea is wrong. His argument is convincing and, despite its brevity, the book covers immense ground. Anyone fascinated by language would enjoy and learn from it.
The notion that the way we use language determines the way we understand the world has (as McWhorter puts it) sexiness. You find it in unexpected places. Daniel Hannan, the Conservative eurosceptic, recently argued from his experience as a European MEP that “there are intrinsic properties in English that favour the expression of empirical, down-to-earth, practical ideas”. He gave no evidence for this assertion, evidently believing that none was necessary.
Scholars of language have a name for this idea. It’s called Whorfianism, after the American linguist Benjamin Whorf. It’s encapsulated in words written by Whorf in 1939: “We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages.”
What does this mean, exactly? Here’s an example given by McWhorter. Russian has a word for light blue and one for dark blue. There is, however, no word for blue. In Russian, says McWhorter, “the sky and a blueberry are different colours”. Does this make a difference to the way that Russian speakers perceive the colour blue?
Actually, it does. Psychological tests showed that Russian speakers were able to identify a very slightly differing shade of blue more quickly than English speakers. The difference in response time, however, amounted to less than one-tenth of a second.
It is on this smidgen of truth, argues McWhorter, that a grand and mistaken theory has been erected. Yes, there is a link between culture and language. McWhorter is critical of the idea, associated with the famed linguist Noam Chomsky, of a “universal grammar” that all languages share. Languages differ. There are some that have no regular verbs (Navajo) and some that have scores, even hundreds, of genders (Nasioi, in Papua New Guinea). That does not mean, however, that language shapes thought all by itself.
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