Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages (31 page)

But we are only just beginning, because the sense of orientation that is required to speak a Guugu Yimithirr–style language has to extend further than the immediate present. What about relating past experiences, for instance? Suppose I ask you to describe a picture you saw in a museum a long time ago. You would probably describe what you see in
your mind’s eye, say the milkmaid pouring the milk into a bowl on a table, the light coming from the window on the left and illuminating the wall behind her, and so on. Or suppose you are trying to remember a dramatic event from many years ago, when you capsized a sailing boat off the Great Barrier Reef. You jumped out to the right just before the boat rolled over to the left, and as you were swimming away you saw a shark in front of you, but . . . if you lived to tell the tale, you would probably describe it more or less as I just did now, by relaying everything from the vantage point of your orientation at the time: jumping “to the right” of the boat, the shark “in front of you.” What you will probably not remember is whether the shark was exactly to the north of you swimming south or to the west swimming east. After all, when there is a shark right in front of you, one of the last things you worry about is the cardinal directions. Similarly, even if at the time you visited the museum you could have worked out the orientation of the room in which the picture was hanging, it is extremely unlikely that you will remember now if the window in the picture was to the north or the east of the girl. What you will see in your mind’s eye is the picture as it appeared when you stood in front of it, that’s all.

But if you speak a Guugu Yimithirr–style language, that sort of memory will simply not do. You cannot say “the window to the left of the girl” so you’ll have to remember if the window was north of her or east or south or west. In the same way, you cannot say “the shark in front of me.” If you want to describe the scene, you’d have to specify, even twenty years later, in which cardinal direction the shark was. So your memories of anything that you might ever want to report will have to be stored in your brain with cardinal directions as part of the picture.

Does this sound far-fetched? John Haviland filmed a Guugu Yimithirr speaker, Jack Bambi, telling his old friends the story of how in his youth he capsized in shark-infested waters but managed to swim safely ashore. Jack and another person were on a trip with a mission boat, delivering clothing and provisions to an outstation on the McIvor River. They were caught in a storm, and their boat capsized in a whirlpool. They both jumped into the water and managed to swim nearly three
miles to the shore, only to discover, on returning to the mission, that Mr. Schwarz was far more concerned at the loss of the boat than relieved at their miraculous escape. Except for its content, the remarkable thing about the story is that it was remembered throughout in cardinal directions: Jack Bambi jumped into the water on the western side of the boat, his companion to the east of the boat, they saw a giant shark swimming north, and so on.

Perhaps the cardinal directions were just made up for the occasion? Well, quite by chance, Stephen Levinson filmed the same person two years later, telling the same story. The cardinal directions matched exactly in the two tellings. Even more remarkable were the hand gestures that accompanied Jack’s story. In the first film, shot in 1980, Jack is facing west. When he tells how the boat flipped over, he rolls his hands forward away from his body. In 1982, he is sitting facing north. Now, when he gets to the climactic point when the boat flips over, he makes a rolling movement from his right to his left. Only this way of representing the hand movements is all wrong. Jack was not rolling his hands from right to left at all. On both occasions, he was simply rolling his hands from east to west! He maintained the correct geographic direction of the boat’s movement, without even giving it a moment’s thought. And as it happens, at the time of year when the accident happened there are strong southeasterly winds in the area, so flipping from east to west seems very likely.

Levinson also relates how a group of Hopevale men once had to drive to Cairns, the nearest city, some 150 miles to the south, to discuss land-rights issues with other aboriginal groups. The meeting was in a room without windows, in a building reached either by a back alley or through a car park, so that the relation between the building and the city layout was somewhat obscured. About a month later, back in Hopevale, he asked a few of the participants about the orientation of the meeting room and the positions of the speakers at the meeting. He got accurate responses, and complete agreement, about the orientation in cardinal directions of the main speaker, the blackboard, and other objects in the room.

What we have established so far is that speakers of Guugu Yimithirr have to be able to recall anything they have ever seen with the crisscross of the cardinal directions as part of the picture. It is almost a tautology to say, therefore, that they must commit to memory a whole extra layer of spatial information that we are blithely unaware of. After all, people who say “the fish in the northeast corner of the shop” obviously have to remember that the fish was in the northeast corner of the shop. Since most of us do not remember whether fish are in northeast corners of shops (even if we could work it out at the time), this means that Guugu Yimithirr speakers register and remember information about space that we do not.

A more controversial question is whether this difference means that Guugu Yimithirr and English ever lead their speakers to remember different versions of the same reality. For example, could the crisscross of cardinal directions that Guugu Yimithirr imposes on the world make its speakers visualize and recall an arrangement of objects in space differently from us?

Before we can see how researchers tried to test such questions, let’s first play a little memory game. I’m going to show you some pictures with a few toy objects arranged on a table. There are three objects in all, but you will see at most two at a time. What you have to do is try to remember their positions, in order to complete the picture later on. We start with
picture 1
, where you can see a house and a girl. Once you have memorized their positions, turn to the next page.

Now, in
picture 2
, you can see the house from the previous picture, and a new object, a tree. Try to remember the position of these two as well, and then turn to the next page.

Finally, in
picture 3
, you see just the girl on the table. Now imagine I gave you the toy tree and asked you to place this tree in a way that would complete the picture and would be consistent with the two layouts you saw before. Where would you put it? Make a small mark (mental or otherwise) on the table before you turn to the next page.

This is not a terribly difficult game, and it doesn’t take prophetic powers to predict where you placed the tree. Your arrangement must have been more or less what is shown in
picture 4
, as you would have followed the obvious clues: earlier, the girl was standing immediately to the left of the house, whereas the tree was much farther to the left. So this must mean that the tree was farther to the left than the girl. If there is any difficulty here, it is only to understand what the point is in doing such obvious exercises.

The point is that for speakers of Guugu Yimithirr or Tzeltal, the solution you have suggested does not seem obvious at all. In fact, when they were given tasks of this nature, they completed the picture in a very different way. They did not put the tree anywhere to the left of the girl, but rather on her other side, to the right, as in
picture 5
.

But why should they get such a simple task so badly wrong? There was nothing wrong about their solution, thank you very much. But there was something wrong about the way I just described it, because contrary to what I said, they did not put the tree “to the right of the girl.” They put it to the south of her. In fact, their solution makes perfect sense if one is thinking in geographic and not egocentric coordinates. To see why, let’s assume that you are reading this book facing north. (You can always turn to face the north, if you know where it is, just to avoid confusion.) If you look back at
picture 1
, you’ll see that the house was to the south of the girl. In
picture 2
, the tree was to the south of the house. Clearly, then, the tree must be south of the girl, since it is farther south from the house, which is farther south from the girl. So when completing the picture, it’s perfectly sensible to put the tree to the south of the girl, as in
picture 5
.