So while it’s clear that tigers would have existed whether or not Adam had got round to calling them that, I’ve always been troubled by a fundamental tenet of Theory, and its offspring literary theory, which at its most extreme (as explained by Jonathan Culler in his life-saving Very Short Introduction to Literary Theory) maintains that ‘the language we speak determines what we can think’. I just don’t think it’s true. Yes, I’d have trouble distinguishing the fourteen different types of snow, let alone explaining the distinction. But that doesn’t mean my senses couldn’t apprehend them, if I took the time to look and touch well enough. If my life depended on the distinctions, as it does for the Inuit, then I’d learn pretty fast, although, yes, I’d probably make up names in order to hold on to my distinctions.
On the one hand, I know that sometimes I think in images, rather than words. Or I (mentally) hear a sound, for which I don’t have an onomatopoetical expression. And there’s been more than one time, when I didn’t know the appropriate word for something, but could still feel/think/experience it. [See The Meaning of Liff for stuff like that.]
On the other hand, language totally “determines what we can think”. Not only do I think about different things in different languages, depending on the topic, in which language I encountered it first or what language I was exposed to most recently. Also my thinking process changes, according to the language I think in. German, for example, is very exact and focussed on details. English offers the big overview. Portuguese is very poetic, using many sayings that conjure up images in my head and make it the ideal language to daydream in. [Please note, that these are my personal associations – I don’t know if most/some/all/no people would agree with me…]
On the third hand [don’t bother me with details like I only have two hands, I’m writing in English, aint I?], I’ve argued time and time again, and I remain convinced, that what we think determines our language. Not the other way round. Or better, what we think determines our language more than our language determines what we think. [Am I still making any sense to anyone?]
For example, take the word nigger – a whole lot of bad connotations, because people were thinking bullshit about black people. So the word got changed, in an effort to start with a clean slate and leave the connotations behind. The PC term became black. Unfortunately, the perception of blacks hadn’t changed that much and the racism and the bad connotations stayed, they just got attached to a new word. New, less succesful attempts were made to change the world by changing the language [African-American, people of colour etc.]. The problem stays the same.
I’m not saying that we might as well can continue to call blacks nigger, because things do change if we change the language. But changing the language isn’t enough, because it’s what we associate with language that needs to be changed, not the language itself. Changing the connotations can be facilitated and helped by changing the language, but it’s not all that needs to be done.
I think I’ll spare you going into Saussure. [Unless you tell me in the comment section that you want to know all about the signifier, the signified and the referent, then I’ll be happy to give you a crash course. Or I’ll just point you to this old post, where I explain the whole thing in German.]
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is… I don’t know. :)
I don’t think that language determines what we can think, but that it determines what we do think.
Any thoughts?
kalafudra's Stuff 
You speak Portugese? Cool…
I don’t know how relevant it is(because this is one of the few books that have been heavily recommended to me that I couldn’t finish) but have you read Steven Pinker’s “The Stuff of Thought”? It SEEMS to be about exactly the same thing you’re talking about, in very great detail. Too much detail for me, actually. :)
Yeah, I spent a year in Brasil, I kind of had to learn it. Though it’s pretty bad now… too little practice.
Haven’t heard of the book, but it sounds pretty much about that. It sounds really interesting.
I agree with you. I once had an argument with a guy because he objected to my using the word ‘whore’, I told him that I was using the word in a descriptive sense, not trying to insult womenkind in any way. He stuck to his guns and in exasperation I put several words for females in a bracket and asked him to pick the one he liked.
However his objection made me think about language and I followed, more of less, the same chain of thought.
If it is our mind that gives us the ability to use language the way we do, I wonder if Shakespere had been born in Delhi, would he have been another Mirza Ghalib? (And vice versa?) hmmm.. interesting thought.
It’s one of the bigger difficulties in communication that words arrive differently than they were sent out. I can say “whore” here, simply describing a profession and you can hear “filthy, typically female scum”. Usually, explaining in more detail helps… But not always, as shown in your example.
If Shakespeare had been born in Delhi… very interesting thought. Safe to say, I think, that he would have been a writer, but he would have written completely differnt things. For, in my opinion, we are as much product of our environment as of our genes/personality.