The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language by John H. McWhorter

Author:John H. McWhorter [McWhorter, John H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2014-02-20T00:00:00+00:00

The question is why that same verdict doesn’t apply to the Russian blues, the Japanese and their materials, or even that other trait Whorfianism has applied to the Chinese, their supposedly vertical sense of time. The Whorfian objects: “Of course all people process plural versus singular—but we’re on to things like vision and sensation and time.” Yet I am aware of no analysis spelling out just why vision and time are more pertinent to cognition than something as basic to experience as number. No matter what clever studies showed about differentials within milliseconds of response, no researcher would gain any traction from claiming that a goatherder in central Africa is more alive than an accountant in Minneapolis or a shoemaker outside of Beijing to there being two people in front of him than one. Why, then, would differentials in milliseconds about anything else in a language shed significant light on something as portentous as How People See the World?

Whatever the responses might be, they would have to square with the fact that there are countless languages in the world that present the speaker of a European language not with more—dark blue and light blue—but less. Some of them don’t even have a word for less. In the rain forest of Surinam in South America, descendants of slaves who escaped plantations in the country in the 1600s live today in thriving communities, speaking their own language called Saramaccan. It’s a blend of words and grammar from English, Portuguese, Dutch, and two African languages, and is not a variety of any of them, but very much a language of its own.

As a real language, it has its quirks. One of them is that to say She is less naughty than him, you must say He is more naughty than her; there simply is no word corresponding to less. There are many languages that have no word for less of this kind; if you think about it, it doesn’t matter—as long as there is a way to say more, less is, technically, a frill. You can always express a thought via mentioning the element that is more rather than the one that is, consequently, less.

Does this mean that Saramaccans, living life as vividly as we do, are less attuned to differences in degree than other people? And more to the point, note how unlikely it is that anyone would attempt to find out, despite Whorfianism’s supposed purely intellectual interest in whether language shapes thought. In comparing other languages with English, the Whorfian quest is fonder of the mores than of the lesses, as it were.

This, however, makes hundreds of languages of East and Southeast Asia risky business for Whorfianism, as they pattern much like Chinese. If the Laotian in his language says Aren’t you afraid the boss will be disgusted when you are preparing food?, he expresses it as “You not fear boss crap-disgust right?, you make eat?” No tense, no articles, no -ing, no when conjunction. If language affects thought, then what

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