Thinking in tongues

Air> Articles > Thinking in tongues

You are probably aware of the fact that concepts are not always translated accurately from one language to another. Language A might have no word for a certain idea that exists in language B, or it might have too many. In the case of the English notion of "home" for instance, a French translator would have to resort to a turn of phrase to render the same concept. This is an example of absence of equivalence in language B.

Consider the following series.
English: mulberry, blueberry, raspberry, strawberry.
French: mûre, myrtille, framboise, fraise.
In the first series the different words obviously refer to objects that belong to one same group: berries. The words alone are enough for us to make the connection, even if we don't know what they refer to. As a matter of fact were there an unrelated object with a name ending in bberry, we'd automatically put it in the same group. In the French series however, we can only put two and two together if we know not only what the objects look like, but enough botany to connect them in our minds. Obviously then, an English speaker and a French speaker won't be thinking of the group above in the same way. In the one case the thinking process involves a whole that is broken down; in the other, they are separate elements that only come together in the presence of knowledge beyond the words themselves.

Now here's something else:
English: water.
Japanese: mizu (cold water), oyu (hot water).
We're now in the presence of a case where language B has too many equivalents for one concept of language A. In Japan Mizu is used by default, as the natural element so to speak. But how is water in the speaker's mind? It isn't just water that is hot or cold: the difference is at a monemic level, something like hotwater and coldwater. This simple spelling device, removing the space between the words, helps one get a feel of what the concept must be like for them. We can also now tell that neither of these words can translate accurately the notion of plain "water". To a Japanese they're just not the same and they can't be grouped under a single word like they are in English. Here's an inverse example to illustrate this: in Japanese there is only one word for both "fun" and "interesting". To us, these are different notions, so different we'd never even think of using one word to mean both. To the Japanese, they are the same thing! Exactly like water is to us. I used simple examples, but one well-known one is that of the Inuit word for "snow": there is no such word. They have different words for falling snow, powdery snow, frozen snow, snow covering a layer of ice Snow plays such a large part in their lives that they can't see it the way we do, as just snow that is either melted or powdery or frozen, etc. Every aspect of snow has different properties and therefore different functions or disadvantages to them, and therefore separate "labelling".

What about the Arabic notion of "tomorrow"? To express this English or French concept we use "bukra" as the closest equivalent. And yet! When you say "tomorrow", you mean the day after today. When we say "bukra", we mean "some point in the future":
"Bukra you'll found a family."
"Bukra you'll see..."
"Bukra the country will see better days."
Similarly, the Lebanese equivalent of "now", "hella'", actually means "presently", "when I'm done", "later":
"Hella' I'll look it up for you."
"Hella' I'll finish the book and lend it to you."
It's hard at this point to tell whether our relaxed way of life seeped into the language or language encouraged the culture to take it easy.

If something as clear and relatively tangible as berries, water and the day after today undergo intellectual shifts from one language to the other, what does that leave to intangible concepts? What happens when you can't point at an object and say, "This is what we call this thing"?
Arabic has two words for "health", the daily-used "so7at" and then "3afia", that actually means something like "flourishing health by God's grace".
French words like "savoir-vivre" and "rendez-vous" seeped into the English language in answer to a lack of such concepts in English.
The Lebanese strew their speech with French and English words because they unconsciously use the most appropriate word at all times, bringing it in from foreign language if it doesn't exist in Lebanese.
This also means that the more languages one is familiar with, the more subtle his or her thinking will be. I mentioned above the fact that the Japanese have only one word for both "fun" and "interesting"; Arabic has neither, or at least I never heard anything equivalent. Instead we have to use such periphrases as "it entertains", "it makes laugh", "delightful", "something I like", "something that matters to me". How do you explain to an Arab that you are interested in astronomy? Unless you phrase it "I love astronomy" (which may be incorrect if you're intrigued by it without being crazy about it), he'll only comprehend it if he speaks another language that contains the notion of intellectual interest. Similarly, a Japanese who doesn't know English or the like is unlikely to understand that "interesting" is for the mind and "fun" for the emotions -- maybe he'd only use the word for something that stimulates both his mind and emotions, and that would be a concept absent from English.

In Benjamin Lee Whorf's excellent Language, Thought and Reality, that I strongly recommend, the Hopi language is analysed in fascinating details. For one thing, Hopi has no tenses as we know them, because the Hopi view of life doesn't fraction time into units the way we do. Instead of minutes ticking away, picture the minutes being strung so that every "present" moment is a string of all the minutes that have passed already. Whorf explains that the Hopi language permits a better understanding of quantum physics than European languages do. Think about it: traditional science was born from the view of the world imposed by European languages, binary and fragmented. Quantum physics challenge our minds because we're not used to conceive of something being both wave and particle at the same time. Hopi accommodates such apparent paradoxes and is in many other ways suited to alternative scientific approaches.

By now the saying "language shapes reality" should be less vague. Comparing linguistic elements is an efficient way to gain insight into different cultures, as well as to learn things about our own that we might not have realized before. More importantly, as I said earlier: the subtlety of our thinking can only expand with our awareness of linguistic differences.