- Are we able to think about things
for which we don't have words?
(upbeat music)
Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening.
I'm Julian Northbrook, and this Doing English.
Does language define thinking?
Or to put it another way,
are the things that we are able to think about
limited by the language that we have?
One of the best films that I saw last year
was the film Arrival,
based on the short story, Story of Your Life, by Ted Chiang.
If you haven't seen this film, or indeed read the story,
and you don't want me to totally ruin
the whole thing for you,
you should probably stop watching this video now,
because I'm gonna give away all the important points,
because that's kind of necessary in order to
talk about the thing that I want to talk about here
in this video.
And indeed, if you have any interest whatsoever
in language or in psycholinguistics,
you are definitely going to want to watch the film Arrival,
or read the story version.
It's a short story, not a complete book.
Because it's based on some very important arguments
in the field of psycholinguistics.
In a nutshell, Arrival is about aliens
which have landed on the planet earth.
The American government seeks out renowned linguist
Dr. Louise Banks, and brings her in
to try and communicate with these aliens.
Right away, Dr. Banks realises
that reproducing the aliens' spoken language,
or indeed, even comprehending it, is basically impossible.
Human beings are just not built in the way
that the aliens are built,
and the bizarre clicking sounds that they make
just mean nothing to us.
Their writing system, on the other hand,
now that is a different kettle of fish.
Their writing system is very much reproducible
by human beings.
And so Dr. Banks throws herself into the study
of the aliens' written language system,
which she notices is quite, quite different
to their spoken language system.
As she studies the way that the aliens write, however,
she starts to notice something very curious.
The way they write is not like how we write.
When we write, we write in words,
starting at the beginning, lining words up,
until we form complete ideas.
Not so for the aliens.
The aliens write in circular characters
that don't start at the beginning and finish at the end,
but rather simply emerge
as a complete whole idea.
But this doesn't make any sense,
because it's almost as if the aliens
already know how the conversation is going to finish.
But how can they know how a conversation finishes
before they start the conversation?
After awhile, our protagonist, Dr. Banks,
starts to realise that indeed,
the aliens actually do know
how the conversation is going to finish before it started.
You see, us human beings are only aware
of one single temporal dimension,
the here and the now, the present.
For us, time is everything.
The past exists only in the form of memories.
The future only as imagination,
expectation of what is to come.
We are only aware of now.
The aliens, however, operate in a very different way.
Their perception of time is totally different.
To them, past present and future are qualitatively the same.
They are equally aware of all temporal dimensions.
To the aliens, time is simply an illusion
and doesn't really exist.
Therefore, when in conversation,
they do know how the conversation is going to finish,
because they are able to see the future
as well as they see the present.
Once she grasps this notion,
she quickly progresses with her study of the alien language.
But as she studies, something very interesting happens.
Anybody who's ever learned a second language,
for example, English, or any other language,
has probably experienced a broadening of the horizons.
Learning a second language gives us opportunities
to see how other cultures think,
and it changes the way that we think.
For Dr. Banks, in this rather extreme situation, however,
she experiences not only a broadening of the horizons,
but a broadening of perception of time.
Suddenly she starts to get flashbacks,
memories of the future.
She remembers things that have not yet happened.
She remembers her daughter dying as a young adult,
even though her daughter has not yet been conceived,
let alone born.
This idea of language defining and changing
the way that we think
is based on a very important argument in psycholinguistics,
called linguistic determinism,
also often called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,
after Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf,
the two people who really first formulated this idea
back in the 1940s.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, in a nutshell,
says that thinking is defined
by the words and the language that we have.
We are able to think about things
that we are able to articulate.
In a very extreme version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,
we would say that if you don't have the words
or the language to describe something,
you would be unable to actually think about that thing.
The exact opposite end of the scale, of course,
would be the idea that language and thinking
are completely unrelated, and if we were somehow able
to remove language from the equation,
we would still be able to think.
Albeit, we wouldn't think in words,
but we would still think.
Of course, we have no evidence for this,
because we just simply don't have anybody
who has never learned a language,
or at least not anybody who isn't severely brain damaged,
or psychologically impaired in some way.
These, of course, are the extreme ends of the spectrum,
and we have a whole range of theories and
kind of gradients of this kind of in-between.
There's been a lot of very interesting research done
on linguistic determinism, much of it on colour terminology,
and languages and cultures which
describe colours in very different ways.
In extreme cases, some cultures only have two colours,
hot and cold.
Apparently, or so I've heard,
Russian splits the shades of blue into two separate colours.
Anybody Russian watching this,
please confirm in the comments.
Japanese, too, has a slightly different way
of thinking about green and blue compared to English.
We say that the leaves on the trees are blue,
because blue also means young and fresh.
The word (uses foreign term) has a double meaning.
We therefore also say that the traffic lights are blue,
whereas clearly to look at, they're green.
There's also been a lot of very interesting research done
with number and counting systems.
For example, the Amazonian tribe, the Piraha,
watch this video for more detail on them,
and why they're linguistically so, so, very interesting.
The Piraha only have one and many in their counting system
and they proved extremely resistant
to even learning the most basic of mathematics,
which was put forward as evidence
for linguistic determinism.
Although I have to point out
that there is very strong counter-evidence for this as well,
because the Australian tribe, the Warlpiri,
also only have one, two, and many in their language,
but they were able to learn mathematics
without too much difficulty.
So what's my take on all of this?
Well, I would very much disagree with this
extreme version of linguistic determinism.
The idea that we are simply unable
to think the things that we don't have words for,
to me, intuitively, at least,
doesn't really make much sense.
But I would also hesitate to agree
with the exact opposite end of the spectrum,
the idea that language and thinking are completely separate,
also to me doesn't really make much sense.
Because as someone who has learned a second language,
I have experienced this rather extreme
broadening of the horizons,
and change in the way that I think about things
based on having learned, again,
a second language to quite a high level.
There are many things which are
said and expressed in Japanese,
which simply aren't expressed in English.
This all has changed the way that I see the world
and think about things,
not to mention, the very deep insights
mastering Japanese has given me into to Japanese culture,
and the very, very different way that Japanese people
behave and think and perceive the world.
This has all given me the benefit of very two
different, contrasting ways, often contrasting ways,
of looking at things.
And again, this has changed me as a person
to quite an extreme extent, I think.
And indeed, I believe that everybody
should learn a second language or languages,
if only for this richness of insight that it brings,
and the way that it allows you to perceive the world
in a much deeper kind of way.
For you, if that means English, fantastic.
If you want to know more about this complex interplay
of language, thinking, and culture,
have a ready of my book, Mater English Fast,
where I talk about this stuff quite a lot.
I also am going to have a complete book
about culture, and the way that it defines language use
as a speaker of English as a second language, coming soon.
It's in the writing stage at the moment.
It's gonna be called Say What You Mean,
and hopefully I'll have it done
sometime in the summer or something like that.
But yeah, it's coming soon.
I think that is about all I've got to say
on this topic for the moment,
although I am sure there will be more videos on this
in the future.
But before I go, let me hand the baton over to you.
What are your thoughts on this idea?
Do you agree with the concept of linguistic determinism,
the idea that language defines thinking,
or do you think the idea
is just a whole big load of codswallop?
Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
I, for one, will be very interested to read them,
and I'm sure other people will be too.
This, then, is Julian Northbrook,
signing off from another daily Julian Northbrook
language learning English linguistic videos,
whatever you want to call them, video.
I really need to come up with a good name for these videos.
See you same time, same place, tomorrow.
Thank you, and good-bye.
Talking about learning languages,
do you want to know what my completely useless
list of top four languages to learn is?
Check this video right here for that.
And here's another question.
Is it possible to forget your first language?
Check this video to find out.