The Language Catalyst

 The following paper was my senior research paper in high school. While there are quite a few topics in it that I would eventually like to expand upon, this is the paper in its original text.

The Language Catalyst:

How the Language You Learn Affects How You Think

Since the beginning of civilization, humans have been trying to understand the world around them. This understanding has two basic elements: perception and comprehension. The senses take in sensory data and send it to the brain to be sorted out into understandable facts. If the eyes perceive an object to be red, the brain will comprehend this object as red. However, this basic recognition of this color is only useful to the individual who is doing the perceiving and only so long as he or she can recall the specifics of the object later. Also, in this raw format the information acquired is impossible to transfer to another individual, quite a barrier for a social creature such as the human. To overcome these obstacles an organizer and communicator is required. This comes in the form of language. Language allows the individual to assign all the nuances and complexities of the perception of the color a simple name: red. It also allows for the transfer of this information to another individual: “This object is red.” More complex thoughts such as “These two objects are both red,” or “This object is not red, but that object is,” become exponentially easier to process, retain, and share.

It quickly becomes obvious that language is integral to comprehension, but this raises important questions. Is language an inactive factor in the comprehension process, merely organizing and communicating without influence? Does its central role allow it to directly influence how the incoming information is processed? What is the method by which language alters the final information? How is being aware of this alteration of perception crucial to the higher study of the world around us? These questions will become the focal points of this paper.

In 1884 a child named Edward Sapir was born to an Orthodox Jewish family in Lauenburg, Germany. Sapir and his family immigrated to the United States in 1889 and he went on to earn a Ph.D. at Columbia University. His passion was in the field of anthropology and he came under the influence of fellow German and anthropologist Franz Boas. [Landin] During his later teaching career, he mentored a particularly bright student named Benjamin Lee Whorf who shared the same passions and interests as himself. The result of their combined work is known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. [Swoyer] The Hypothesis, also known as the theory of linguistic relativity, suggests that differences in language are related to differences in perception. Sapir had a particularly strong interest in the cultural aspects and impact of this theory, and devoted much of his personal studies to the application of the theory to the languages of the American Indian tribes. [Landin] Additionally, he looked at speech from a physical point of view, considering the functions of the organs required to create speech. He suggests that biologically speaking we are not fitted primarily to talk. Rather, speech is the result of the careful development of secondary functions of the organs involved. [Sapir, Section I] These studies which he was so passionate about led him to the conclusion that speaking and comprehending the world in a different language than someone else can affect the very perception of that world. The difference between the hypothesis of Sapir and Whorf and the theory of linguistic determinism, which this paper considers, is that linguistic determinism is semantically different, placing a higher importance on language in the overall composition of factors that impact perception.

One of the most visible pieces of evidence supporting linguistic determinism is the fact that not only do languages reflect the environment around its speakers, the speakers perceive their world differently due to the structure laid down by their language. For example, the language of the indigenous people of Lapland and northern Finland has twenty-seven separate words for snow. Thick snow, powdery snow, wet snow, and various other possibilities all have their own word in the language of these people. However, there is no single word for ‘snow’. In the mind of these natives, a light, powdery snow is a completely different thing than a thick, wet snow. Through the use and differentiation of these words, they actually gain a heightened understanding of the snow. To them, the variations in snow are as diverse as the differences in species of trees are to us. The major difference between the two cultures here is that languages such as English have developed a broader sense of the word ‘tree’. An American could point to a maple and an oak and have the lingual ability to articulate the overall concept of ‘tree’ that connects them. A Lapp in the same situation with two variants of snow does not have this option, and is thus essentially unaware of it.

Consider for a moment a language much closer to home. The Germans have developed a word, Schadenfreude, which essentially means ‘malicious joy’. Due to the fact that English and German language structure is extremely similar, an English-speaking person has the ability to translate Schadenfreude roughly into malicious joy and gain a basic understanding of its meaning and the correlation to their own situation. However, the German has an easier access to this idea both linguistically and mentally through the word. This ease of access heightens awareness, and this heightened awareness has the potential to affect the very analysis of any given situation, and thus the overall worldview of the person involved.

A recent study involving the Pirahã, a tribe of hunter-gatherers who make their home on the banks of the Maici River in Brazil, has provided another piece of information supporting the theory. The number system in the Pirahã language is very limited, consisting of words for ‘one,’ ‘two,’ and ‘many’. Such “one, two, many” languages are often found in association with primitive cultures in which the need to count any higher than two is rarely, if ever, encountered. The study placed members of the tribe in a matching exercise with a scientist in which the scientist would lay out a given number of objects and the Pirahã would attempt to match the number of objects. When the numbers moved much beyond three, the tribe member found themselves incapable of distinguishing exactly how many objects had been placed before them. [Biever] This indicates that the language structure of their culture has not provided them with the necessary tools to perceive differences between amounts beyond their very limited system of numbering. Clearly this aspect of their language has substantially affected their thought process, disabling the cognitive power of the brain to perceive larger numbers though disuse and subsequent unawareness that the talent even exists. Linguistic determinism, therefore, plays a key role in deciding which of the human brain’s innate abilities will be developed. Just as the Pirahã develop limited number skills via their language because they have little need for the skill in their environment, the speakers of the more advanced languages have far more developed number systems to accommodate a larger need to count in their environments.

Sapir once proposed that language has a tendency to drift on its own due to various changing factors of the environment of the speakers. [Landin] However, with the dramatic influence of language on thought highlighted by studies such as the Pirahã number study, an important question arises: If the Pirahã miss the perception due to their language structure, what am I missing? The global academic community has long known that to acquire a greater understanding of any given field, one must gain a basic understanding of the language of the preeminent scholars of the field. This exchange of ideas between scholars of different native languages is crucial to progress as it allows ideas to be viewed from a different perspective and language structure. The expedient progress of academia in the future will rely as much on bridge-building between the scholarly communities of different languages as it will on the innate talent of the scholars themselves. [Barany]

While a complete overhaul of the academic languages may one day be feasible to through off the yoke of the more burdensome aspects of current language structure, the sciences are going to need a more immediately practical solution for overcoming the language barrier. The short-term solution lies in the liberal redefining of words or phrases in order to convey ideas fluidly that ordinarily would get caught up in diction and lose their original potency. Philosophy, for example, is a field of academia so immersed in abstract concepts that a newcomer to its texts would need to be fluent in several languages and have a list of redefinitions on hand just to fully understand the nuances of some of the proposals. While this departure from simple language may be daunting to a newcomer, it makes the philosopher’s conveyance of thoughts infinitely easier.

With the modern world moving faster than ever before, the relevance of linguistic determinism and its influence on progress is growing. With solid evidence coming in from Northern Finland to Germany to Central Brazil and lucid minds such as Sapir, Whorf, and their successors laying down the groundwork for a greater understanding of how our own language affects our worldview, the global academic community cannot afford to continue coercing brilliant minds into the parochial structure of broken English as a common language. Language is central to perception and understanding and allows or denies new perspective on old ideas. As the world looks to the future it should take care not to allow itself to fall into patterns of language and thought that inhibit significant forward progress. Let hard sciences such as physics free themselves willingly of the lingual norms which abstract sciences such as metaphysics and philosophy have cast off out of necessity.