Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue (17 page)

In other words, Whorf was just wrong—and yet without the zest of his writings on Hopi, it is likely that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis would not have caught on at all.

Of course, Whorf hedged a bit, admitting that grammar did not utterly prevent a person from being able to think about or talk about things the grammar did not explicitly mark. Rather, a grammar makes it much
easier
to think of and talk about some things than others:

But the general tenor of Whorf’s writings reveals little interest in the potential and an ardently promulgated obsession with the habitual:

 

The emphasis above is Whorf’s, and his writing is sometimes almost narcoticized with his fascination with the exotic inner world of the Hopi as channeled through their purportedly tenseless tongue:

 

It isn’t hard to see why so many smart people from the thirties on have thrilled to this notion, especially couched in such eloquent phrasing. Whorf was also a mesmerizing speaker, and a looker to boot. Yet because the foundational presentation was founded on sand and no one has since found any further confirmation elsewhere, it is dismaying to see how deeply the idea has permeated educated thought nevertheless.

Try squaring the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis with, for example, the fact that today’s English was once Old English. As we have seen, the language I am writing in was not planted in one fell swoop from on high. Modern English is the current stage of what began as a very different grammar, much like German’s. Over a millennium-and-a-half, this grammar had grammatical features from Celtic plugged into it Botox-style, while also being radically shorn of its complexities liposuction-style by adults learning it as a second language.

Now, let’s try to look at this language we speak as it is today through the eyes of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. We English speakers “cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way” and “cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees.” Or, as an early Whorfian put it:

 

The problem is that according to this logic, the differences between Old English and Modern English grammar must reflect differences between Anglo-Saxon culture and life in modern New York or London.

So first of all, we now have meaningless
do
. Unlike Old English speakers, we have to say
I do not walk
and
Do I walk?
Thus, presumably, since Anglo-Saxon days, English speakers have become especially alert to negativity and uncertainty, such that we have to stress verbs with
do
in the relevant types of sentence. Obviously that makes no sense—it’s simply that we snapped up meaningless
do
from Welsh and Cornish because speakers of those languages were learning English.

Now, as it happens, Whorf was not unaware that languages are always picking things up from one another, noting, “It is clear that linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity cannot be absolute in the face of the known facts of linguistic change, multilingualism, and cultural diffusion.”

But even then, note what he wrote next: “People do make new discriminations and find linguistic expressions for them, often by borrowing.” It sounds as if Whorf thought that speakers of a language took in features from another language only if those features provided a way of expressing the “new discriminations” they had fallen into.

That is, meaningless
do
made its way into English because English speakers for some reason had become uniquely alert to negation and questionhood and were ripe for some nearby language to give them a way to vent this alertness? But what about how in South Africa, Xhosa and Zulu picked up click sounds from Khoisan languages? Was it because they had drifted into a latent desire to make such sounds and the Khoisan languages just happened to fulfill the need? Or was it because, well, the languages spoken next door happened to have clicks in them? Clearly, drifting into “new discriminations” is not a precondition for taking a feature from another language. The precondition is, simply, proximity.

And then, what about how English got easier over the centuries? According to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, compared to Old English speakers, Modern English speakers are dimwits.

Since we no longer classify our nouns by gender, we are less sensitive to masculinity and femininity as abstract concepts. This implies that the fashion in late-twentieth-century academia for treating gender as a societal construct had actually penetrated the world view of Joe Barstool (Tavernstool?) as early as A.D. 1200.

We are, apparently, less alert to the fact that anger, remembrance, error, fear, and shame are things that we ourselves feel. Old English speakers “feared themselves” when they felt afraid just as they behaved themselves. These days, apparently, there is always a part of an Anglophone that supposes that, just maybe, his feelings are experienced by someone else.

And then, never mind that when we see a car coming, the fact that it is moving
to
here (
hither
) rather than already
here
is less vivid to us than it was vivid to an Anglo-Saxon farmer that a carriage was coming toward him rather than resting in front of him. Old English “cut nature up” in a way that rendered those farmers more aware of movement than we must be, with our one-size-fits-all
here
,
there,
and
where
.

We are also less clear on the difference between the immediate context of people we are talking to in the moment and people in the abstract. The Old English speaker had the pronoun
man
(actually pronounced “mon” in the way that we today associate with Anglophone Caribbeans) to refer to an abstract “they”—
Man
says that the language is getting easier
—or “one”—
Man
speaks Old English here!
But even though the typical Old English speaker spent his life in a village whereas the typical Modern English speaker has read newspapers, traveled some, and today has broadband, the Old English speaker’s grammar rendered him more cosmopolitan than we are, more aware of a world beyond his own head.

And forget our processing that when we
have e-mailed
something, an action has been performed while when we
have left
, a state has arisen in which we
are gone
. When using the perfect, Old English speakers used
be
instead of
have
, with a bunch of verbs that referred more to how things ended up than an event happening. Apparently to us today, “states, schmates”—everything is an action.

In the several-decades’-deep literature on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, I am aware of no address of what its implications would be for how a language has changed over time. This is a serious problem, because if there is anything really interesting to the hypothesis, then surely we seek meaningful correlations between the culture of Anglo-Saxons, who spoke a grammar like German’s, and the culture of Modern English speakers, who speak a language a little like Welsh and a lot like nothing else.

I venture that no scholar will see it as promising to investigate whether Modern English speakers are psychologically less alert to the nuance of daily experience than Anglo-Saxon villagers. And to the extent that Whorfians object that it is a two-way street and culture can also affect grammar, we wonder what it was about England becoming a literate, industrialized society that would have encouraged a simpler grammar.

The disconnection between cultural development and grammar is also clear in that societies have turned upside down over time while the grammar stayed put. As psychologist Herbert Clark has put it, if the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis “has any force historically, we should find examples of beliefs failing to change over time because of the conventions that exist in the language. Such examples do not readily come to mind.”

Right—take Russia. All would agree that certain changes have occurred in prevailing beliefs in that country over the past thousand years—from brute feudalism under the tsars to Communism to glasnost to the queer blend of democracy and dictatorship of today. Yet Russian grammar during that time has always been the marvelous nightmare that it is now. Russian has changed, to be sure, but without equivalents to the Celtic adoption and the Viking disruption, and nowhere near as dramatically as English—and in no ways that could be correlated with things Peter the Great, the Romanovs, or Lenin did.

Whenever you read someone making reference to the Whorfian perspective on language, whoever the writer picked it up from has never had occasion to address just why Modern English speakers are not rather troglodytic creatures compared to Anglo-Saxon-speaking warriors.

In general, there is curiously little interest among people fascinated by the Whorfian paradigm in examining whether a given grammatical trait conditions a certain way of thinking not just in one language, but in other ones. As towering a mind as literary critic Edmund Wilson, for example, thought the reason Russians seemed unable to keep to a schedule was that Russian is a language where future tense is indicated largely via context—but then Japanese is like that, too, and the Japanese have never seemed to have any problem with schedules.

Journalist Mark Abley, engaging writer though he is, falls into this trap in his enthusiasm for Whorfianism. In French and many other Western European languages, there are two words for
know
:
savoir
means to know a fact;
connaître
means to know a person or to be familiar with something. Abley has it that:

 

Really? Is Abley really so sure that the difference between knowing the capital of Nebraska and knowing a friend is more immediate to Gérard Depardieu than to Judi Dench? It’s a cute idea, yes—but does Abley actually have any grounds for supposing that it is true?

How does it sound when it’s French that has one word where English has more, and when it isn’t something as immediately evident as the European
know
verbs? In French,
sortir
means “go out,” but also covers what English would express with
come out
(in the earthquake,
le tiroir est sorti de la commode,
“the drawer came out of the dresser”),
get out
(someone is in a hole and says,
“Sors-moi d’ici!”
“Get me out of here!”), and
stick out
as in one’s tongue (
“Sors la langue,”
“Stick out your tongue”).

So—are we English speakers more attuned than French speakers to the difference between leaving home, something slipping out of place, being yanked out of a hole, and sticking out our tongues? I would venture that the answer is no. To be a reasoning representative of
Homo sapiens
is to understand those four processes as radically different, whether or not your language happens to have the same word for them. The same applies to how your language happens to mark knowing.

Abley also shows us that the Boro language of India has verbs with charmingly specific meanings. The implication is that to speak Boro is to be uniquely attuned to these highly particular concepts, such as: