It's what you pay attention to

By R.L.G. | NEW YORK

GUY DEUTSCHER chimed in with a new piece last weekend in the New York Times on the recently hot-again topic of language and thought. Language, he says, really may play a big role in how we think. Like Lera Boroditsky, whom we discussed earlier, Mr Deutscher cites some of the recent evidence that while language may not constrict your thought—Ludwig Wittgenstein was quite wrong in saying "the limits of my language are the limits of my world"—it may just nudge or steer it. Often the results are quite subtle, but in at least one case they are quite striking.

The examples Mr Deutscher gives in the piece (which is adapted from his new book, "Through the Language Glass") were all mentioned by Ms Boroditsky in her Wall Street Journal piece and in this Edge article. However, Mr Deutscher gets into more detail here on the Guugu Yimithir, a northern Australian people whose language requires them to say "north", "west" and other absolute directions where most people will say "left", "right", "forward" and "back". This, consequently, trains them to stay remarkably oriented at all times, paying attention to every (literal) twist and turn in their lives in a way utterly alien to most of us.

One Guugu Yimithirr speaker was filmed telling his friends the story of how in his youth, he capsized in shark-infested waters. He and an older person were caught in a storm, and their boat tipped over...the remarkable thing about the story was that it was remembered throughout in cardinal directions: the speaker jumped into the water on the western side of the boat, his companion to the east of the boat, they saw a giant shark swimming north and so on. Perhaps the cardinal directions were just made up for the occasion? Well, quite by chance, the same person was filmed some years later telling the same story. The cardinal directions matched exactly in the two tellings.

The nub of all this is what Roman Jakobson, another linguist, noted: "Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey." Virtually any language can say virtually anything (with some non-trivial differences in how easy those things are to say). But some languages require attention to certain details. English has a fairly complex tense and aspect system that distinguishes "I am speaking", "I speak", "I spoke", "I had spoken", "I had been speaking, "I have been speaking", "I will have spoken" and so on. (As my colleague noted last week, African-American Vernacular English has an even more subtle distinction between "I been done" for something that happened a long time ago and "I been doing" for something that has been going on for a while). This requires noting distinctions in how long something has gone on, and when it began and when it ended relative to some other event. The system comes maddeningly slowly to English-learners.

I, by contrast, hate how hard I have to think about the verbs of motion in Russian. (Other Slavic languages are similar.) There is no simple "to go"; you need to choose a verb denoting whether you are going on foot, in a land vehicle, on an aircraft or by sea. A second choice requires you to determine whether it is a completed action (the perfective aspect) or a continuous one (imperfective); what is more, when you use the present tense, the imperfective aspect denotes an action in the present, but the perfective denotes the future. A third choice is whether you are making a single one-way trip, a round-trip or a series of habitual trips, which determines both which aspect you use and which prefixes you attach.

It's tempting, therefore, to say that Russians pay attention to their journeys as much as the Guugu Yimithirr. And of course all these verbs of motion conjugate across first, second and third person, singular and plural. And they're all irregular. Why can't they make do with just "go"?, the frustrated language-learner asks.

Similarly, formal Arabic has three "theys", they (two), they (more than two, mixed or male) and they (more than two, all female), and five yous (female, male, dual, male/mixed plural or all female plural). Other languages force you to distinguish between "we" including the person you're talking to, and "we" excluding that person. China, meanwhile, has a fairly stripped down system: ta makes do for "he" and "she" (and "him" and "her", too). Either Arabs are hugely concerened about identifying people, or the Chinese don't care, or (as I reckon) they merely do the same thing in different ways, either obligatory or optional. In any case, the diversity of how languages do even the simple things is striking and fascinating.

I'm sure readers can think of other distinctions languages force you to make that are surprising or interesting. I'm thinking of extremely common ones that you must make all the time (pronouns, verbs of motion) and not relatively infrequent things, like the fact that Russian has no word for "blue", only for light and dark blue. Or, on the other hand, if a language collapses meanings into one word in a way you find surprising (like one word for "he" and "she"), let us know about that too.

(Note: Spelling of "Jakobson" corrected.)