by James McElvenny at Aeon Magazine: Anyone who has learned a second language will have made an exhilarating (and yet somehow unsettling) discovery: there is never a one-to-one correspondence in meaning between the words and phrases of one language and another. Even the most banal expressions have a slightly different sense, issuing from a network of attitudes and ideas unique to each language. Switching between languages, we may feel as if we are stepping from one world into another. Each language seemingly compels us to talk in a certain way and to see things from a particular perspective. But is this just an illusion? Does each language really embody a different worldview, or even dictate specific patterns of thought to its speakers?
In the modern academic context, such questions are usually treated under the rubrics of ‘linguistic relativity’ or the ‘Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’. Contemporary research is focused on pinning down these questions, on trying to formulate them in rigorous terms that can be tested empirically. But current notions concerning connections between language, mind and worldview have a long history, spanning several intellectual epochs, each with their own preoccupations. Running through this history is a recurring scepticism surrounding linguistic relativity, engendered not only by the difficulties of pinning it down, but by a deep-seated ambivalence about the assumptions and implications of relativistic doctrines.
There is quite a bit at stake in entertaining the possibility of linguistic relativity – it impinges directly on our understanding of the nature of human language. A long-held assumption in Western philosophy, classically formulated in the work of Aristotle, maintains that words are mere labels we apply to existing ideas in order to share those ideas with others. But linguistic relativity makes language an active force in shaping our thoughts. Furthermore, if we permit fundamental variation between languages and their presumably entangled worldviews, we are confronted with difficult questions about the constitution of our common humanity. Could it be that there are unbridgeable gulfs in thinking and perception between groups of people speaking different languages?
The roots of our present ideas about linguistic relativity extend at least as far back as the Enlightenment of the late 17th to the 18th century. Enlightenment discussions were often couched in terms of the ‘genius’ of a language, an expression first coined in French as le génie de la langue. The term was used in a wide variety of senses, to the point where it was often not clear what precisely was meant. One contemporary commentator remarked: ‘[W]e often ask what is the genius of a language, and it is difficult to say.’ What we can say is that the genius of a language was understood as representing its distinct character, the je ne sais quoi that constitutes the idiomatic in each idiom. This unique character was frequently taken to embody something of the national mentality of the speakers of a language.
A classic – and highly influential – formulation came in 1772 with the Treatise on the Origin of Language by the German philosopher and poet Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803). In opposition to contemporaries who saw the ultimate origins of human language in animal cries, Herder insisted that there is a difference in kind between human and animal communication. Human language, so Herder argued, rests on the irreducible human capacity for ‘reflection’ (Besonnenheit), our ability to recognise and think about our own thoughts. In coining our words, we reflect on the properties of the things they name, and choose the most salient of these. Different peoples will have focused on different properties, with the result that each language with its characteristic forms will encapsulate a slightly different perspective on the world. As languages are passed on from generation to generation, the differences between them accumulate, making the languages and the worldviews they contain more and more distinct. In order to understand the unique perspective of each language, we must trace the forms of words back to their etymological origins.
The Herderian thread was picked up in the early 19th century and woven most expertly into a broader account of language and literature by Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835). Humboldt endorsed an element of linguistic determinism – that is, that language not only reflects a particular worldview but is actively involved in shaping it: ‘Language,’ he wrote , ‘is the forming organ of thought.’ The relationship he envisaged, however, was not one-way but dialectic. Between language and thought there inheres an endless feedback loop: our thoughts shape our words, and our words shape our thoughts. His account was not restricted to individual words – more important were the grammatical structures exhibited in the languages of the world. But even the study of grammar was only a preliminary to the real task, according to Humboldt. Grammar and vocabulary merely represent the ‘dead skeleton’ of a language. To capture its character, to see its ‘living structure’, we must appreciate its literature, the use made of the language by its most eloquent speakers and writers.
Despite Humboldt’s exhortations to seek the life of language in literature, his successors in the 19th century concentrated on devising classifications of languages revolving around their grammatical features. The goal was often described as identifying the ‘inner form’ of each language. ‘Inner form’ was a term used by Humboldt (although only fleetingly) to refer to the underlying structure and organisation of a language, as opposed to its ‘outer form’, the externally perceptible features of its words, grammar and sound system. Humboldt’s inner form carries forward the concerns of the Enlightenment’s genius of a language, while the outer form consists of the pedantic details of noun declensions, verb conjugations, regular sound substitutions and so on.
Many scholars working in Humboldt’s wake adopted his ‘inner form’ and developed it in different directions, although the most prominent version of this notion was that elaborated by Heymann Steinthal (1823-99). Inner form served as the centrepiece of Steinthal’s classification of languages, which in turn lay at the heart of his Völkerpsychologie, the ‘psychology of peoples’ or ‘ethnopsychology’. The overarching aim of Völkerpsychologie was to describe the supposed shared mentality of each nation. The inner form of a language, so believed Steinthal, was the perfect window to this national mind.
But during the course of the 19th century, talk of national minds and the character of languages fell out of fashion in the academic study of language. In this period, comparative-historical grammar became established as the premier field of linguistics. This is the approach that carefully compares words and grammatical forms across languages in order to chart their historical changes and identify their putative genealogical relations. Comparative-historical linguistics tells us, for example, that French, Italian and Spanish are all descended from Latin; that Hindi-Urdu, Bengali and Punjabi can trace their ancestry to Sanskrit; and that all these languages, along with many others traditionally spoken from western Europe to northern India, are part of the extended Indo-European family.
The hypothetical progenitor of this great family, Proto-Indo-European, has been lost to time, but elements of its vocabulary, grammar and sound system can be reconstructed from the traits of its descendants. Crucially, these are all aspects of the ‘outer form’ of languages – and the linguists who investigated these outer forms preferred to describe the historical transmutations they studied in terms of ‘sound laws’. Sound laws are mere statements of fact, that a sound attested in a certain phonetic environment in a parent language changes into other sounds in its descendants. Such accounts avoid invoking any hidden, underlying explanatory principles. Most comparative-historical grammarians believed that, for linguistics to be considered a serious science, it must limit itself to solid, objectively observable data. Uncovering the inner life of languages, capturing their characters and connections to thought and culture, were at best seen as future tasks for a thoroughly grounded science of language. At worst, they were taken to be nothing more than idle metaphysical speculation.
