Babel's Children (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Linguistics

Babel's children

Jan 8th 2004 | LEIPZIG
 From The Economist print edition

Corbis

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Languages may be more different from each other than is currently 
supposed. That may affect the way people think

http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2329718

IT IS hard to conceive of a language without nouns or verbs. But that 
is just what Riau Indonesian is, according to David Gil, a researcher 
at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig. 
Dr Gil has been studying Riau for the past 12 years. Initially, he 
says, he struggled with the language, despite being fluent in standard 
Indonesian. However, a breakthrough came when he realised that what he 
had been thinking of as different parts of speech were, in fact, 
grammatically the same. For example, the phrase ?the chicken is eating? 
translates into colloquial Riau as ?ayam makan?. Literally, this is 
?chicken eat?. But the same pair of words also have meanings as diverse 
as ?the chicken is making somebody eat?, or ?somebody is eating where 
the chicken is?. There are, he says, no modifiers that distinguish the 
tenses of verbs. Nor are there modifiers for nouns that distinguish the 
definite from the indefinite (?the?, as opposed to ?a?). Indeed, there 
are no features in Riau Indonesian that distinguish nouns from verbs. 
These categories, he says, are imposed because the languages that 
western linguists are familiar with have them.

This sort of observation flies in the face of conventional wisdom about 
what language is. Most linguists are influenced by the work of Noam 
Chomsky?in particular, his theory of ?deep grammar?. According to Dr 
Chomsky, people are born with a sort of linguistic template in their 
brains. This is a set of rules that allows children to learn a language 
quickly, but also imposes constraints and structure on what is learnt. 
Evidence in support of this theory includes the tendency of children to 
make systematic mistakes which indicate a tendency to impose rules on 
what turn out to be grammatical exceptions (eg, ?I dided it? instead of 
?I did it?). There is also the ability of the children of migrant 
workers to invent new languages known as creoles out of the 
grammatically incoherent pidgin spoken by their parents. Exactly what 
the deep grammar consists of is still not clear, but a basic 
distinction between nouns and verbs would probably be one of its 
minimum requirements.

Plumbing the grammatical depths

Dr Gil contends, however, that there is a risk of unconscious bias 
leading to the conclusion that a particular sort of grammar exists in 
an unfamiliar language. That is because it is easier for linguists to 
discover extra features in foreign languages?for example tones that 
change the meaning of words, which are common in Indonesian but do not 
exist in European languages?than to realise that elements which are 
taken for granted in a linguist's native language may be absent from 
another. Despite the best intentions, he says, there is a tendency to 
fit languages into a mould. And since most linguists are westerners, 
that mould is usually an Indo-European language from the West.

It need not, however, be a modern language. Dr Gil's point about bias 
is well illustrated by the history of the study of the world's most 
widely spoken tongue. Many of the people who developed modern 
linguistics had had an education in Latin and Greek. As a consequence, 
English was often described until well into the 20th century as having 
six different noun cases, because Latin has six. (A noun case is how 
that noun's grammatical use is distinguished, for example as a subject 
or as an object.) Only relatively recently did grammarians begin a 
debate over noun cases in English. Some now contend that it does not 
have noun cases at all, others that it has two (one for the possessive, 
the other for everything else) while still others maintain that there 
are three or four cases. These would include the nominative (for the 
subject of a sentence), the accusative (for its object) and the 
genitive (to indicate possession).

The difficulty is compounded if a linguist is not fluent in the 
language he is studying. The process of linguistic fieldwork is a 
painstaking one, fraught with pitfalls. Its mainstay is the use of 
?informants? who tell linguists, in interviews and on paper, about 
their language. Unfortunately, these informants tend to be 
better-educated than their fellows, and are often fluent in more than 
one language. This, in conjunction with the comparatively formal 
setting of an interview (even if it is done in as basic a location as 
possible), can systematically distort the results. While such 
interviews are an unavoidable, and essential, part of the process, Dr 
Gil has also resorted to various ruses in his attempts to elicit 
linguistic information. In one of them, he would sit by the ferry 
terminal on Batam, an Indonesian island near Singapore, with sketches 
of fish doing different things. He then struck up conversations with 
shoeshine boys hanging around the dock, hoping that the boys would 
describe what the fish were doing in a relaxed, colloquial manner.

The experiment, though, was not entirely successful: when the boys 
realised his intention, they began to speak more formally. This 
experience, says Dr Gil, illustrates the difficulties of collecting 
authentic information about the ways in which people speak. But those 
differences, whether or not they reflect the absence of a Chomskian 
deep grammar, might be relevant not just to language, but to the very 
way in which people think.

Word, words, words

A project that Dr Gil is just beginning in Indonesia, in collaboration 
with Lera Boroditsky, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of 
Technology, is examining correlations between the way concepts are 
expressed in languages and how native speakers of these languages 
think. This is a test of a hypothesis first made by Benjamin Lee Whorf, 
an early 20th-century American linguist, that the structure of language 
affects the way people think. Though Whorf's hypothesis fell into 
disfavour half a century ago, it is now undergoing something of a 
revival.

Dr Boroditsky's experiment is simple. People are shown three pictures, 
one of a man about to kick a ball, one of the same man having just 
kicked a ball, and a third of a different man who is about to kick a 
ball. They are then asked which two of the three are the most similar. 
Indonesians generally choose the first two pictures, which have the 
same man in them, while English speakers are likely to identify the two 
pictures that show the ball about to be kicked?an emphasis on the 
temporal, rather than the spatial, relationship between the principal 
objects in the picture.

Dr Gil believes that this might be because time is, in English, an 
integral grammatical concept?every verb must have a tense, be it past, 
present or future. By contrast, in Indonesian, expressing a verb's 
tense is optional, and not always done. In support of Whorf's idea, Dr 
Gil half-jokingly cites the fact that Indonesians always seem to be 
running late. But there is more systematic evidence, too. For example, 
native Indonesian speakers who also speak English fall between the two 
groups of monoglots in the experiment. Dr Gil supposes that their 
thought processes are influenced by their knowledge of both English and 
Indonesian grammar.

Demonstrating any sort of causal link would, nevertheless, be hard. 
Indeed, the first challenge the researchers must surmount if they are 
to prove Whorf correct is to show that English and Indonesian speakers 
do, in fact, think differently about time, and are not answering 
questions in different ways for some other reason. If that does prove 
to be the case, says Dr Gil, their remains the thorny question of 
whether it is the differences in language of the two groups that 
influences their conception of time, or vice versa.

Dr Boroditsky and Dr Gil are not intending to restrict their study to 
ideas about time. They plan, for example, to study gender. English, 
unlike many other languages, does not assign genders to most nouns. 
Does this affect the way English-speakers think of gender? Languages 
also differ in the ways they distinguish between singular and plural 
nouns. Indeed, some do not distinguish at all, while others have a 
special case, called the dual, that refers only to a pair of something. 
Descriptions of spatial relations, too, vary, with languages dividing 
the world up differently by using different sorts of prepositions. The 
notion that grammar might affect the way people think may seem 
far-fetched, and even unappealing to those who are confident of their 
own free will. But if Dr Gil is right and there do exist languages, 
like Riau Indonesian, without nouns or verbs, the difficulty of 
conceiving just that fact points out how much grammar itself shapes at 
least some thoughts.

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Copyright ? 2004 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All 
rights reserved.
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