Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Translation between “civilized” and “primitive” languages distinguished in this way was clearly impossible. The solution was to teach colonial subjects a form of language that would enable them to acquire civilization, and the obvious tool to carry out the mission civilisatrice was the language of the imperial administrators themselves. In some cases, as in the Spanish conquest of the Americas, the impoverished resources of native languages were seen as such a threat to the spread of civilization that the languages and their written records had to be eradicated. But the destruction of the Maya codices wasn’t solely an expression of naked power, religious fervor, and racism.[101] The suppression of lesser tongues was not a policy reserved by the Spanish for other continents—it was already the European norm. France had already begun its long campaign to stop people speaking anything that was not French within its own borders. Breton, Basque, Provençal, Alsatian, Picard, Gascon, and many other rural patois were almost hounded out of existence by laws and institutions over a period of several hundred years. The long pan-European drive toward “standard languages” was powered not only by political will, economic integration, urbanization, and other forces at play in the real world. It also expressed a deeply held belief that only some languages were suited to civilized thought.

What, then, can it mean to “think in Hopi”? If it means anything, can it be called “thought”? The linguist Edward Sapir came up with a revolutionary answer in the early part of the last century. Breaking with millennial practice and prejudice, he declared that all languages were equal. There is no hierarchy of tongues. Every variety of human language constitutes a system that is complete and entire, fully adequate to performing all the tasks that its users wish to make of it.

Sapir didn’t argue this case out of political correctness. He made his claims on the basis of long study of languages of many different kinds. The evidence itself brought him to see that any attempt to match the grammar of a language with the culture of its speakers or their ethnic origins was completely impossible. “Language,” “culture,” and “race” were independent variables. He turned the main part of von Humboldt’s legacy—European linguistic nationalism—upside down.

Sapir showed that there is nothing “simple” about the languages of “simple” societies—and nothing especially “complex” about the languages of economically advanced ones. In his writings on language he showed like no one before him just how immensely varied the forms of language are and how their distribution among societies of very different kinds corresponds to no overarching pattern. But he did not reject every part of the inheritance of von Humboldt’s study of Basque. Different languages, because they are structured in different ways, make their speakers pay attention to different aspects of the world. Having to mark presence or absence in languages that have evidentials (see here and here), or being obliged to mark time in languages of the Western European type, lays down what he called mind grooves—habitual patterns of thought. The question for translation (and for anthropology) is this: Can we jump the grooves and move more or less satisfactorily from one “habitual pattern” to another?

The view that you can’t ever really do this has become known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, despite the fact that Edward Sapir never subscribed to the idea. The trouble with the simple form of this misnamed prejudice—that translation is impossible between any two languages because each language constructs a radically different mental world—is that if it were true you would not be able to know it. The parable of the NASA captain’s report of an alien language, given here, is one way to show how flawed the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis really is. A more sophisticated version of the same line of thinking runs up against equally powerful blocks. If we grant that different languages provide different kinds of tools for thinking but allow for substantial overlaps—without which there could be no translation—we are left with the idea that there are just some things in, let us say, French that can never be expressed in English, and vice versa. There would then be an area of “thinking in French” that was “ineffable” in any other tongue. That contradicts the axiom of effability, which, as we argued in chapter 13, is the sine qua non for translation to exist. It makes no difference to the argument against it whether the ineffable is held to be an attribute of God or of poetry, or a property of French.