Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages (46 page)

“we were in the middle of a young diggings township”: G. E. Dalrymple,
Narrative and Reports of the Queensland North East Coast Expedition
, 1873, quoted in Haviland and Haviland 1980, 120. For the history of Guugu Yimithirr, see Haviland 1979b, Haviland and Haviland 1980, Haviland 1985, and Loos 1978.

“when savages are pitted against civilisation”: “The black police,” editorial,
Cooktown Herald and Palmer River Advertiser
, June 24, 1874, p. 5.

No words for “in front of” and “behind”: Haviland (1998) argues that Guugu Yimithirr can in some limited circumstances use the noun
thagaal
, “front,” in relation to space, e.g., in
George nyulu thagaal-bi
, “George was at the front.” But this seems to be used to describe not spatial position as such but George’s leading role.

Guugu Yimithirr spatial language and orientation: Levinson 2003.

“two girls, the one has nose to the east”: Levinson 2003, 119.

Geographic coordinates in Australian languages: The Djaru language of Kimberley, Western Australia: Tsunoda 1981, 246; Kayardild from Bentinck Island, between the Cape York Peninsula and Arnhem Land: Evans 1995, 218; Arrernte (Western Desert): Wilkins 2006, 52ff.; Warlpiri (Western Desert): Laughren 1978, as quoted in Wilkins 2006, 53; Yankunytjatjara (Western Desert): Goddard 1985, 128. Geographic coordinates elsewhere: Madagascar: Keenan and Ochs 1979, 151; Nepal: Niraula et al. 2004; Bali: Wassmann and Dasen 1998; Hai||om: Widlok 1997. See also Majid et al. 2004, 111.

Marquesan: Cablitz 2002.

Bali: Wassmann and Dasen 1998, 692–93.

McPhee’s
House in Bali
: McPhee 1947, 122ff. In the south of Bali, where McPhee lived, the mountain direction is roughly north, so McPhee follows the usual practice of translating the terms seaward and mountainward as south and north, respectively. It should be noted that the directions of the dance in Bali have religious significance.

page 171 “But white fellows wouldn’t understand that”: Haviland 1998, 26.

The orientation skills of the Guugu Yimithirr: Levinson 2003, chs. 4, 6. On orientation skills of other Australian Aborigines, see Lewis 1976. On Tzeltal, see Brown and Levinson 1993.

strange sensation that the sun did not rise in the east: Levinson 2003, 128.

Jack’s shark story: Haviland 1993, 14.

Guugu Yimithirr spatial memory: Levinson 2003, 131.

The ongoing debate on the “rotating tables” experiments: See Li and Gleitman 2002; Levinson et al. 2002; Levinson 2003; Majid et al. 2004; Haun et al. 2006; Pinker 2007, 141 ff.; Li et al. (forthcoming). Many varieties of the rotating table experiments were conducted, and in most of them the subjects were not asked to “complete a picture,” as in the setup demonstrated here, but rather asked to memorize a certain order of objects and then “make it the same” on a different table. The “make it the same” instruction has attracted most criticism. Li et al. (forthcoming) argue that “make it the same” is ultimately an ambiguous instruction and that “in solving ambiguous rotation tasks, when the participant is asked to reproduce the ‘same’ spatial array or path as before, he or she needs to guess the experimenter’s intent as to what counts as the ‘same.’ To make this inference, people are likely to implicitly consult the way their language community customarily speaks about or responds to inquiries about locations and directions.” This criticism seems to me to be largely justified. However, the “complete the picture” experiment that I have presented above does not, as far as I can see, suffer from this problem, as it does not rely on the possibly vague and interpretable notion of “the same.” A further point of criticism by Li et al. that seems largely justified to me is against Levinson’s (2003, 153) claim that there is systematic downgrading of egocentric coordinates in the perception of Guugu Yimithirr and Tzeltal speakers. Li et al. did not find any evidence for such downgrading in the experiments they conducted with Tzeltal speakers. What is more, on the face of it, the downgrading claim is reminiscent of the Whorfian fallacy that the lack of a concept in a language necessarily means that speakers
are unable to understand this concept. None of the claims made in this chapter rely on downgrading. Rather, they relate to the
additional
level of geographic computation and memory that Guugu Yimithirr and Tzeltal speakers are continually obliged to do and to the habits of mind that arise in consequence.

Jaminjung: Schultze-Berndt 2006, 103–4.

Yukatek: Majid et al. 2004, 111.

Hai||om orientation: See Neumann and Widlok 1996 and Widlok 1997.

Acquisition of geographic coordinates: De León 1994; Wassmann and Dasen 1998; and Brown and Levinson 2000. Some cultural artifacts may also contribute, of course. In Bali, for instance, houses are always built facing the same direction, the head of family always sleeps on the same side of the house, and children are always put in bed in a particular direction (Wassmann and Dassen 1998, 694).

8:
SEX AND SYNTAX

The significance of the genders in Heine’s poem: Vygotsky 1987, 253, Veit 1976; and Walser 1983, 195–96.

“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem”: Heine quotes these lines in a letter to Moses Moser (Jan. 9, 1824) written not long after the poems were published: “Verwelke meine Rechte, wenn ich Deiner vergesse, Jeruscholayim, sind ungefähr die Worte des Psalmisten, und es sind auch noch immer die meinigen” (Heine 1865, 142).

“I also am a man of importance”: Bage 1784, 274.

Supyire: Carlson 1994.

Ngan’gityemerri: Reid 1997, 173.

Manambu: Aikhenvald 1996.

Underlying regularities in the distribution of genders in German: Köpcke and Zubin 1984.

The origin of gender systems: Claudi 1985; Aikhenvald 2000; and Greenberg 1978.

Loss of the genders in English: Curzon 2003.

“He that is become hoorse lately”: Brunschwig 1561, 14b–15a.

page 207 Dialectal uses of feminine nouns: Beattie 1788, 139, and Peacock 1877.

Femininity of “ship”: Strangely enough, “ship” is a relative newcomer on the gender ocean, for in Old English a
scip
was actually neuter, not feminine. So the use of a gendered pronoun here seems to be an actual case of personification, not just an old relic.

Experiment at the Moscow Psychological Institute: Jakobson 1959a, 237, and Jakobson 1972, 108.

German and Spanish comparisons: Konishi 1993.

French and Spanish comparisons: Sera et al. 2002.

Italian nonsense words: Ervin 1962, 257.

Boroditsky and Schmidt’s memory experiment: Boroditsky et al. 2003, but detailed results of the experiment based on Boroditsky and Schmidt (unpublished).

9:
RUSSIAN BLUES

page 217 Japanese traffic lights: Conlan 2005. The official Japanese standard for green traffic lights shown in
figure 7
is taken from Janoff 1994, and from the Web site of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Lighting Research Center (
http://www.lrc.rpi.edu/programs/transportation
/LED/LEDTrafficSignalComparison.asp
). The official American standard is taken from Institute of Transportation Engineers 2005, 24.

Kay and Kempton’s experiment: Kay and Kempton 1984. More sophisticated experiments of this nature were carried out by Roberson et al. 2000, 2005.

Russian blues: Winawer et al. 2007.

The border between
siniy
and
goluboy
: This border (and for English speakers, the border between light and dark blue) was determined after the experiment for each participant separately. Each participant was shown twenty different shades of blue and asked to say whether each one was
siniy
or
goluboy
. English speakers were asked whether each shade was “light blue” or “dark blue.”

Left and right visual fields experiments: Gilbert et al. 2006. The results of this experiment inspired a spate of adaptations by different
teams in different countries. See Drivonikou et al. 2007; Gilbert et al. 2008; and Roberson et al. 2008. All the subsequent tests corroborated the basic conclusions.

Broca’s area as a seat of language: Broca 1861. For a history, see Young 1970, 134–49.

MRI experiment: Tan et al. 2008.

EPILOGUE: FORGIVE US OUR IGNORANCES

Influence of language on thought can be considered significant only if it bears on genuine reasoning: See, e.g., Pinker 2007, 135.

APPENDIX: COLOR: IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

Color sensation in the brain: For further details on the anatomy of color vision, see Kaiser and Boynton 1996 and Valberg 2005.

“with only a little exaggeration”: Mollon 1995, 134. On the evolution of color vision, see also Mollon 1999 and Regan et al. 2001.

Memory affects perception of color: Hansen et al. 2006.

Adelung, J. C.
Mithridates: Oder allgemeine Sprachenkunde
. 1806–17. Intro. and ed. Johann Severin Vater. Berlin: Vossische Buchhandlung.

Aikhenvald, A. Y. 1996. Physical properties in a gender system: A study of Manambu.
Language and Linguistics in Melanesia
27:175–87.

———. 2000.
Classifiers.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Allen, G. 1878. Development of the sense of colour.
Mind
3 (9):129–32.

———. 1879.
The colour sense: Its origin and development
. London: Trubner.

Almquist, E. 1883. Studien über den Farbensinn der Tschuktschen. In
Die wissenschaftlichen Ergebnisse der Vega-Expedition,
ed. A. E. von Nordenskiöld, 1:42–49. Leipzig: Brockhaus.

Andree, R. 1878. Ueber den Farbensinn der Naturvölker.
Zeitschrift für Ethnologie
10:324–34.

Bacon, F. 1861.
The works of Francis Bacon, baron of Verulam, viscount St. Alban, and lord high chancellor of England
. Vol. 2. Ed. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath. Boston: Brown and Taggard.

Bage, R. 1784.
Barham Downs.
Rpt. New York: Garland, 1979.

Bancroft, W. D. 1924. The recognition of blue.
Journal of Physical Chemistry
28:131–44.

Bastian, A. 1869. Miscellen.
Zeitschrift für Ethnologie und ihre Hülfswissenschaften als Lehre vom Menschen in seinen Beziehungen zur Natur und zur Geschichte
1:89–90.

Beattie, J. 1788.
The theory of language
. Edinburgh: A. Strahan.

Bebbington, D. W. 2004.
The mind of Gladstone: Religion, Homer, and politics
. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Berlin, B., and P. Kay. 1969.
Basic color terms: Their universality and evolution
. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Besterman, T., ed. 1987.
The complete works of Voltaire
. Vol. 33. Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire.

Blackie, J. S. 1866.
Homer and the “Iliad
.” Vol. 4. Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas.

Bloomfield, L. 1933.
Language
. London: George Allen and Unwin.

Boas, F. 1910. Psychological problems in anthropology. Lecture delivered at the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the opening of Clark University, September 1909.
American Journal of Psychology
21 (3):371–84.

———. 1920. The methods of ethnology.
American Anthropologist
, new series 22 (4):311–21.

———. 1938. Language. In
General Anthropology,
ed. F. Boas, 124–45. Boston: D. C. Heath.

Boman, T. 1960.
Hebrew thought compared with Greek
. London: SCM Press.

Boroditsky, L., L. Schmidt, and W. Phillips. 2003. Sex, syntax, and semantics. In
Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and thought
, ed. D. Gentner and S. Goldin-Meadow, 61–78. London: MIT Press.

Boroditsky, L., and L. Schmidt. Sex, syntax, and semantics. Unpublished ms.

Breva-Claramonte, M. 2001. Data collection and data analysis in Lorenzo Hervás: Laying the ground for modern linguistic typology. In
Historia de la lingüística en España
, ed. E. F. K. Koerner and Hans-Josef Niederehe, 265–80. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Broca, P. P. 1861. Perte de la parole, ramollissement chronique et destruction partielle du lobe antérieur gauche du cerveau.
Bulletins de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris
(Séance du 18 avril 1861) 2:235–38.

Brown, C. H. 2005. Finger and hand. In Haspelmath et al. 2005.

Brown, P., and S. C. Levinson. 1993. “Uphill” and “downhill” in Tzeltal.
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
3:46–74.

———. 2000. Frames of spatial reference and their acquisition in Tenejapan Tzeltal. In
Culture thought and development
, ed. L. Nucci, G. Saxe, and E. Turiel, 167–97. London: Laurence Erlbaum Associates.

Brunetière, F. 1895. Discours de réception a l’Académie française, 15.2.1894. In
Nouveaux essais sur la littérature contemporaine
. Paris: C. Lévy.

Brunschwig, H. 1561.
The most excellent and perfecte homish apothecarye or homely physick booke for all the grefes and diseases of the bodye
.
Translated out the Almaine Speche into English by John Hollybush
. Collen: Arnold Birckman.