Fortieth Edition - Think before you speak?

The chicken and egg question of whether thought precedes language or language determines the way we think, has been the subject of lengthy - and sometimes heated - debate among linguists, psychologists, philologists, philosophers, anthropologists and others. The implications of this debate are significant in many areas, including translation.

In the fourth century AD, St. Agustine (Aurelius Augustinus - known as St. Augustine of Hippo -354-430 AD.) theorized that he himself had acquired language. “By constantly hearing words, as they occurred in various sentences,” he wrote “I collected gradually for what they stood, and having broken in my mouth to these signs, I thereby gave utterance to my will.” In De Magistro, St. Agustine argues that language does not determine what we know, it just reminds us of what we already know. Therefore, we do not learn anything new, but we only remember what we already know. For St. Agustine, as for other classical thinkers, language is only the tool that our minds use to represent reality.

In Prometheus Unbound, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), proposes an entirely different point of view – that language determines how we think:

“He gave man speech, and speech created thought,
Which is the measure of the universe;”

This was the view that Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835), a German philosopher, scholar, philologist and statesman took to an extreme. His Weltanschauung (the way someone sees the world) hypothesis proposes that all thought is controlled by language. Therefore, without language there is no thought.

“Der mensch lebt mit den Gegenständen hauptsächlich, ja…sogar ausschliesslich so, wie die Sprache sie ihm zufürt.” (Human use objects mainly, well… even only, as language makes them accessible to them.)

“It is only through the study of language that there comes into the soul, out of the source of all thoughts and feelings, the entire expanse of ideas, everything that concerns man, above all and beyond everything else, even beauty and art.”

Humboldt’s hypothesis does not have many followers today, because there is evidence that disputes the theory that language determines thought and that thought without language is impossible.

At the time of his death, Humboldt was writing about the ancient Kawi language spoken in the island of Java, Indonesia. Although his work was unfinished, “The Heterogeneity of Language and its Influence on the Intellectual Development of Mankind” an essay that he wrote as an introduction , was published in 1836.

Linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity are the basic principles of the Whorf-Sapir theory proposed by the Americans Edward Sapir (1884-1936), Yale linguist-anthropologist and his student Benjamin Whorf (1887-1994), a chemical engineer who became interested in linguistics. In his work “The Status of Linguistics as a Science”, Sapir writes:

“Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication and reflection. The fact of the matter is that the "real world" is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group.”

For his part , Whorf studied the language of the Hopi Indians of Arizona, and noted such peculiarities as the lack of distinction among tenses of verbs (present, past, future), and their use of one term 'masa'ytaka' to designate everything that flies, including airplanes, flying insects and even pilots. This led Whorf t the conclusion that the Hopi’s perception of the world must be different from his own. However, he was pointed out that “The Hopi language is capable of accounting for and describing correctly all observable phenomena of the universe.” 

In the following decades, The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis came under attack by the followers of Avram Noam Chomsky. An American professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Chomsky laid down the foundation for many of the present theories about how the mind works. According to Chomsky, the human mind is cognitive – it contains mental states, beliefs, doubts, etc., and the adult mind is innately wired to be able to do large parts of what it can do. For example, although children are not born with the ability to speak a language, all are born with a very powerful ability to learn languages, so that they are able to learn several languages in their early years.

 
Psychologists have taken Chomsky’s theory even further, and today we do not consider the mind to be a blank slate at birth. For example, in the 22 July 2004 edition of Nature magazine, Paul Bloom reports on a study conducted by Susan J. Hespos, of the Department of Psychology and Human Development of Vanderbilt University and Elizabeth S Spelke, of the Department of Psychology of Harvard University. The purpose of this study was to research whether thought precedes the acquisition of language, and it is based on a linguistic contrast between English and Korean.

Korean makes a distinction between tight-fitting contact and loose-fitting contact that does not exist in English. Even young children in Korea, who are just beginning to learn the language, are able to make this distinction. Therefore, Hespos and Spelke decided to investigate whether five month-old babies in an English-speaking environment would be able to make this conceptual distinction, or whether the distinction is only present as a result of acquiring the Korean language, in which case only Korean adults and children with some knowledge of the language would be able to make the distinction between these two different types of contact.

What they found was that the infants detected this distinction, but adult English speakers did not. Therefore, this capacity does not depend on language experience. According to Hespos and Spelke “Language learning therefore seems to develop by linking linguistic forms to universal, pre-existing representations of sound and meaning.

What does all this mean in terms of translation? Fortunately for InterSol, common wisdom says that although there are differences among languages, it is possible to translate from one language into another. Translation is much more than converting words in one language into words in another language, but even that task can be tricky, because what in one language can be expressed with only one word, can require two or more words in another.

For example, in Spanish there are two different words for “corner”: “esquina” and “rincón”, (an inside corner). As you can see, it is necessary to use two words in English to convey the meaning of “rincón”. “Gasoline” means “car water” in Navajo. The Japanese, for whom rice is the most important staple of their diet and the centerpiece of almost every meal, use many different terms to refer to it:
Kome: Rice in general, as a plant, as a grain crop, or as an uncooked foodstuff.
Gohan: Cooked rice, usually served in a bowl, usually steamed, but may also be boiled.
Raisu: Cooked rice (generally steamed) served on a dish instead of a bowl
Onigiri: A hand-packed cake or ball of rice (derived from the verb nigiru - to grip or grasp).

Of course, there is much more than this to the art of translation, but that will have to be the topic of a future newsletter.


References:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/augustine/#1
http://www.venus.vacom.ai/suggestion/sapir.html
http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/humboldt.htm
http://www.tjf.or.jp/eng/ge/ge01rice2.htm