Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Sapir actually had much more interesting things to tell us about languages and the way they relate to social and especially intellectual life. Greek and Latin have served as the vehicles of sophisticated thinking that deals in abstract entities. Both have grammatical features that make it easy to create abstract nouns from verbs, adjectives, and other nouns. A strong trace of the grammatical facility for creating abstract entities in classical languages can be seen in those large parts of the English vocabulary that have Latin and Greek roots: humanhumanity, justjustice, civilcivility, translatetranslation, calculus calculatecalculation, and so forth. Sapir’s point was that instead of saying that Latin and Greek are well suited to abstract thought, we should say, rather, that abstract thought is well suited to Greek and Latin and view the particular kinds of philosophical discourse that were developed by their speakers as a consequence of the grammar they used. The mind grooves laid down by the forms of a language are not prison walls but the hills and valleys of a mental landscape where some paths are easier to follow than others. If Plato had had Hopi to think with, he would not have come up with Platonic philosophy, that’s for sure—and that’s probably not a merely retrospective illusion based on the observable fact that there’s no Hopi speaker who thinks he is Plato. Hopi thinkers think something else. That does not make Hopi a primitive language unsuited to true thought. It means that speakers of what Sapir called “Average West European” are poorly equipped to engage in Hopi thought. To expand our minds and to become more fully civilized members of the human race, we should learn as many different languages as we can. The diversity of tongues is a treasure and a resource for thinking new thoughts.

If you go into a Starbucks and ask for “coffee,” the barista most likely will give you a blank stare. To him the word means absolutely nothing. There are at least thirty-seven words for coffee in my local dialect of Coffeeshop Talk (or tok-kofi, as it would be called if I lived in Papua New Guinea). Unless you use one of these individuated terms, your utterance will seem baffling or produce an unwanted result. You should point this out next time anyone tells you that Eskimo has a hundred words for snow. If a Martian explorer should visit your local bar and deduce from the lingo that Average West Europeans lack a single word to designate the type that covers all tokens of small quantities of a hot or cold black or brown liquid in a disposable cup, and consequently pour scorn on your language as inappropriate to higher forms of interplanetary thought—well, now you can tell him where to get off.

FIFTEEN Bibles and Bananas: The Vertical Axis of Translation Relations

Let’s start with the math. For any three languages there are 3 × 2 = 6 different translation relations: FrenchRussian, Russian French; FrenchGerman, GermanFrench; RussianGerman and GermanRussian. Among any four there are 4 × 3 = 12; for n languages there are n × (n–1) directions of translation possible. So, since there are approximately seven thousand known languages in the world, there are 24,496,500 pairs of languages between which translation could in principle take place in either direction, giving rise to nearly 49 million potentially separate translation practices, each with its own tools and conventions. Translation is a universal capacity of human societies, and a level playing field of that size cannot be ruled out on purely theoretical grounds. In reality, however, the number of language pairs with established practices of translation is infinitesimal compared with all those that could exist.

Translation does not happen every which way nowadays and never has. But in which ways does it happen? The fundamental answer, though a very broad one, is that it happens either UP or DOWN. As these are technical terms of my own invention, I’ve put them in small capitals.

Every human language serves as a full means of communication for some community, and in that sense there is no hierarchy among them. But acts of translation, which are rarely isolated events, typically exploit and support an asymmetrical relationship between source and target tongues.