consultantslanguage determinism

2021年1月20日发(作者：coox)
【
New York Times
】
Does Your Language Shape How You Think?

(August 26, 2010)

Seventy years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short article that set in motion one of
the trendiest intellectual fads of the 20th century. At first glance, there seemed little about the article to augur its
subsequent celebrity. Neither the title, “Science and Linguistics,” nor the magazine,

M.I.T.
’s Technology Review,
was most people’s idea of glamour. And the author, a chemical engineer who worked for an insurance company
and moonlighted as an anthropology lecturer at

Yale University, was an unlikely candidate for international
superstardom.
And yet Benjamin Lee Whorf let loose an alluring idea about language’s power over the mind, and
his stirring prose seduced a whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we are able to
think.

In particular, Whorf announced, Native American languages impose on their speakers a picture of reality that
is totally different from ours, so their speakers would simply not be able to understand some of our most basic
concepts, like the flow of time or the distinction between objects (like
“stone”) and actions (like “fall”). For decades,
Whorf’s theory dazzled both academics and the general public alike. In his shadow, others made a whole range of
imaginative claims about the supposed power of language, from the assertion that Native American languages
instill in their speakers an intuitive understanding of Einstein’s concept of time as a fourth dimension to the theory
that the nature of the Jewish religion was determined by the tense system of ancient Hebrew.

Eventually, Whorf’s theory crash
-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired that there
had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims. The reaction was so severe that for
decades, any attempts to explore the influence of the mother tongue on our thoughts were relegated to the loony
fringes of disrepute. But 70 years on, it is surely time to put the trauma of Whorf behind us. And in the last few
years, new research has revealed that when we learn our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of
thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways.

Whorf, we now know, made many mistakes. The most serious one was to assume that our mother tongue
constrains our minds and prevents us from being able to think certain thoughts. The general structure of his
arguments was to claim that if a language has no word for a certain concept, then its speakers would not be able
to understand this concept. If a language has no future tense, for instance, its speakers would simply not be able
to grasp our notion of future time. It seems barely comprehensible that this line of argument could ever have
achieved such success, given that so much contrary evidence confronts you wherever you look. When you ask, in
perfectly normal English, a
nd in the present tense, “Are you coming tomorrow?” do you feel your grip on the
notion of futurity slipping away? Do English speakers who have never heard the German word Schadenfreude
find it difficult to understand the concept of relishing someone else’
s misfortune? Or think about it this way: If the
inventory of ready-made words in your language determined which concepts you were able to understand, how
would you ever learn anything new?

SINCE THERE IS NO EVIDENCE that any language forbids its speakers to think anything, we must look in
an entirely different direction to discover how our mother tongue really does shape our experience of the world.
Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between
languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they
must convey and not in what they may
convey.” This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages
influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather
because of what it habitually obliges us to think about.

Consider this example. Suppose I say to you in English that “I spent yesterday evening with a neighbor.” You
may well wonder
whether my companion was male or female, but I have the right to tell you politely that it’s none
of your business. But if we were speaking French or German, I wouldn’t have the privilege to equivocate in this
way, because I would be obliged by the grammar of language to choose between voisin or voisine; Nachbar or
Nachbarin. These languages compel me to inform you about the sex of my companion whether or not I feel it is
remotely your concern. This does not mean, of course, that English speakers are unable to understand the
differences between evenings spent with male or female neighbors, but it does mean that they do not have to

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consider the sexes of neighbors, friends, teachers and a host of other persons each time they come up in a
conversation, whereas speakers of some languages are obliged to do so.

On the other hand, English does oblige you to specify certain types of information that can be left to the
context in other languages. If I want to tell you in English about a dinner with my neighbor, I may not have to
mention the neighbor’s sex, but I do have to tell you something about the timing of the event: I have to decide
whether we dined, have been dining, are dining, will be dining and so on. Chinese, on the other hand, does not
oblige its speakers to specify the exact time of the action in this way, because the same verb form can be used for
past, present or future actions. Again, this does not mean that the Chinese are unable to understand the concept
of time. But it does mean they are not obliged to think about timing whenever they describe an action.

When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive
to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be
required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only
natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences,
perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.

BUT IS THERE any evidence for this happening in practice?

Let’s take genders again. Languages like Spanish, French, German and Russian not only oblige you to think
about the sex of friends and neighbors, but they also assign a male or female gender to a whole range of
inanimate objects quite at whim. What, for instance, is particularly feminine about a Frenchman’s beard (
la barbe)?
Why is Russian water a she, and why does she become a he once you have dipped a tea bag into her?

Mark
Twain

famously lamented such
erratic genders as female turnips and neuter maidens in his rant “The Awful
German Language.” But whereas he claimed that there was something particularly perverse about the German
gender system, it is in fact English that is unusual, at least among European languages, in not treating turnips and
tea cups as masculine or feminine. Languages that treat an inanimate object as a he or a she force their speakers
to talk about such an object as if it were a man or a woman. And as anyone whose mother tongue has a gender
system will tell you, once the habit has taken hold, it is all but impossible to shake off. When I speak English, I
may say about a bed that “it” is too soft, but as a native Hebrew speaker, I actually feel “she” is too soft. “She”
stays feminine all the way from the lungs up to the glottis and is neutered only when she reaches the tip of the
tongue.

In recent years, various experiments have shown that grammatical genders can shape the feelings and
associations of speakers toward objects around them. In the 1990s, for example, psychologists compared
associations between speakers of German and Spanish. There are many inanimate nouns whose genders in the
two languages are reversed. A German bridge is feminine (die Brü
cke), for instance, but el puente is masculine in
Spanish; and the same goes for clocks, apartments, forks, newspapers, pockets, shoulders, stamps, tickets,
violins, the sun, the world and love. On the other hand, an apple is masculine for Germans but feminine in
Spanish, and so are chairs, brooms, butterflies, keys, mountains, stars, tables, wars, rain and garbage. When
speakers were asked to grade various objects on a range of characteristics, Spanish speakers deemed bridges,
clocks and violins to have more “manly properties” like strength
, but Germans tended to think of them as more
slender or elegant. With objects like mountains or chairs, which are “he” in German but “she” in Spanish, the
effect was reversed.

In a different experiment, French and Spanish speakers were asked to assign human voices to various
objects in a cartoon. When French speakers saw a picture of a fork (la fourchette), most of them wanted it to
speak in a woman’s voice, but Spanish speakers, for whom
el tenedor is masculine, preferred a gravelly male
voice for it. Mor
e recently, psychologists have even shown that “gendered languages” imprint gender traits for
objects so strongly in the mind that these associations obstruct speakers’ ability to commit information to memory.

Of course, all this does not mean that speakers of Spanish or French or German fail to understand that
inanimate objects do not really have biological sex
—
a German woman rarely mistakes her husband for a hat,
and Spanish men are not known to confuse a bed with what might be lying in it. Nonetheless, once gender
connotations have been imposed on impressionable young minds, they lead those with a gendered mother
tongue to see the inanimate world through lenses tinted with associations and emotional responses that English

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