Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

However, the rapid exploration of the diversity of human languages in the nineteenth century also led people to wonder in what ways the languages of less developed peoples were different from “civilized” tongues. Greek had “produced” a Plato, but Hopi had not. Was this because so-called primitive languages were not suited to higher thought? Or was it the lack of civilization itself that had kept primitive languages in their irrational and alien states? Von Humboldt’s hypothesis of an indissoluble bond between language and mentality could be used to argue either way around. Were there any general features of the languages of “natives” that marked them off as a class from those few languages that were spoken by the civilized nations of the world? And if so, what were they?

Explorer-linguists observed quite correctly that the languages of peoples living in what were for them exotic locales had lots of words for exotic things, and supplied subtle distinctions among many different kinds of animals, plants, tools, and ritual objects. The evidence piled up at a disproportionate rate simply because the explorers wanted to know first of all what all these strange objects in their new environment were called. Accounts of so-called primitive languages generally consisted of word lists elicited from interpreters or from sessions of pointing and asking for names.[98] But the languages of these remote cultures seemed deficient in words for “time,” “past,” “future,” “language,” “law,” “state,” “government,” “navy,” or “God.” Trique, a language spoken in Mexico, has no word for “miracle,” for example, only specific words for “heal the sick,” “part the waters,” and so forth.[99] Consequently, it was difficult to translate into such languages most of the things that colonial administrators and missionaries needed to say. How could these strange folk be granted the benefits of civilization if the languages they spoke did not allow for the expression of civilized things? More particularly, the difficulty of expressing “abstract thought” of the Western kind in many Native American and African languages suggested that the capacity for abstraction was the key to the progress of the human mind.

Savages will have twenty independent words each expressing the act of cutting some particular thing, without having any name for cutting in general; they will have as many to describe birds, fish and trees of different kinds, but no general equivalents for the terms “bird,” “fish” or “tree.”[100]

The “concrete languages” of the non-Western world were not just the reflection of the lower degree of civilization of the peoples who spoke them but the root cause of their backward state. By the dawn of the twentieth century, “too many concrete nouns” and “not enough abstractions” became the conventional qualities of “primitive” tongues.

That’s what people actually mean when they repeat the story about Eskimo words for snow. The multiplicity of concrete terms “in Eskimo” displays its speakers’ lack of the key feature of the civilized mind—the capacity to see things not as unique items but as tokens of a more general class. We can see that all kinds of snow—soft snow, wet snow, dry snow, poudreuse, melting snow, molten snow, slush, sleet, dirty gray snow, brown muddy snow, banks of snow heaped up by wind, snowbanks made by human hand, avalanches, and ski runs, to name but fourteen—are all instances of the same phenomenon, which we call “snow”; “Eskimos” see the varieties, not the class. (This isn’t true of real Inuit people, only of the Eskimos who figure in the Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax.)