Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

The observation “other people just don’t think the way we do” was made long before von Humboldt’s essays appeared, but for most of human history it was dealt with quite easily. In Greek eyes, “barbarians” who couldn’t speak Greek were obviously not capable of saying anything interesting. Similarly, for the grammarians of seventeenth-century France, other languages could barely allow their speakers to engage in approximations to real thought, which was truly possible only in Latin and French. It must have taken great courage to express von Humboldt’s insight in the colonial era, when the otherness of other languages was generally thought to confirm the intellectual inferiority of people less fortunate than the French (or the Greeks, or the Romans, and so forth). Like Sir William Jones, the Bengal judge, von Humboldt dared to assert that other languages offered speakers of “West European” a wonderful mental resource.

Colonial expansion and conquest brought Europeans into contact with languages that were even more different than Basque. Some of them, dotted here and there around the globe in no obvious pattern, are very different indeed. Imagine a language in which there is no term for “left” or “right” but only expressions for laterality cast in terms of cardinal orientation. “There’s a fly on your southwest leg” might mean “left” or “right,” depending on which way the speaker and his interlocutor are facing. (This is less unfamiliar than it first sounds: in contemporary Manhattanese we use cardinal orientation whenever we say “go uptown from here.” To the dismay of many a lost tourist, that can’t be translated into tournez à gauche or à droite unless you also know which of the four cardinal points you are facing.) Speakers of Kuuk Thaayorre (Cape York, Australia), for example, lay out ordered sets (say, numbers from one to ten, or photographs of faces aged from babyhood to maturity) not from “left” to “right” or the other way around but starting from east—wherever east happens to be with respect to the table at which their anthropological linguist interrogator is seated.[96]

But languages can be even weirder than that. In Nootka, a language spoken on the Pacific coast of Canada, speakers characteristically mark some physical feature of the person addressed or spoken of either by means of suffixes or by inserting meaningless consonants in the body of a word. You can get a very faint idea of how this works from vulgar infixes such as “fan-bloody-tastic” in colloquial English. In Nootka, however, the physical classes indicated by these methods are children, unusually fat or heavy people, unusually short adults, those suffering from some defect of the eye, hunchbacks, those that are lame, left-handed persons, and circumcised males.[97]

One example of the radical difference of human languages was made famous by the American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf, who had learned and studied many Native American languages. In the language of the Hopi (but also in quite a few others, distributed with no obvious pattern around the globe), there is a grammatical category called evidentials. For each noun-phrase, the grammar of Hopi marks not so much the categories of definiteness or indefiniteness (“a farmer,” “the farmer”) but whether the thing or person referred to is within the field of vision of the speaker. “The farmer I can see” has a different form from “the farmer I saw yesterday,” which is different again from the form of “the farmer you told me about.” As a result, the English sentence “The farmer killed the duck” is quite untranslatable into Hopi without a heap of information the English sentence doesn’t give you—notably, whether the farmer in question is present to the speaker as he speaks and whether the duck is still lying around. If you speak Hopi, of course, and are speaking it to other Hopi speakers in an environment where the duck and the farmer are either with you or not, you know the answers to these questions and can express your meaning grammatically. What you can’t translate in a meaningful way is the sentence “The farmer killed the duck” out of context. But as we have seen in earlier chapters, this kind of untranslatability holds for any de-contextualized sentence in any language. The use of Hopi-type grammars as evidence of the untranslatability of tongues is really a red herring. Isolated, unsituated, written example sentences are often more hindrance than help when it comes to thinking about translation.