Big fat disclaimer: I sent a link to this story to a colleague; she told me that the guy featured in the article, Daniel Everett, administered her comprehensive exams and is not British as he claims but "American, a member of the Summer Institute of Linguists (an evangelical group who brings Bible translation to remote places; they have done amazing linguistic research), and the former chairperson of the linguistics dept. at U.Pitt - who had to flee the country for embezzling funds from Pitt!" Also, "His story about the murder plot has been suspect for a long time." Which gave me pause about posting this, but it's still pretty interesting, and you can make up your own mind what you think about it all.
Read this amazing article from Spiegel International about a small group of Brazilian natives whose language--Piraha-- "departs from what were long thought to be essential features of all languages."
The language is incredibly spare. The Pirahã use only three pronouns. They hardly use any words associated with time and past tense verb conjugations don't exist. Apparently colors aren't very important to the Pirahãs, either -- they don't describe any of them in their language. But of all the curiosities, the one that bugs linguists the most is that Pirahã is likely the only language in the world that doesn't use subordinate clauses. Instead of saying, "When I have finished eating, I would like to speak with you," the Pirahãs say, "I finish eating, I speak with you."Equally perplexing: In their everyday lives, the Pirahãs appear to have no need for numbers. During the time he spent with them, Everett never once heard words like "all," "every," and "more" from the Pirahãs. There is one word, "hói," which does come close to the numeral 1. But it can also mean "small" or describe a relatively small amount -- like two small fish as opposed to one big fish, for example. And they don't even appear to count without language, on their fingers for example, in order to determine how many pieces of meat they have to grill for the villagers, how many days of meat they have left from the anteaters they've hunted or how much they demand from Brazilian traders for their six baskets of Brazil nuts.
Not only do these people have no numbers, because they have never had to intellectualize counting or any form of math, they can't be taught to count to ten. It's not that they're stupid--the article makes the point that "Their thinking isn't any slower than the average college freshman," some of whom also have trouble with basic math and subordinate clauses. They just have no way of accommodating ideas for which they have no set of linguistic structures.
Daniel Everett, the linguist who's worked with the tribe, argues that "the language is created by the culture." These people live in the here and now and they don't need to know how many beans are in a can, so they've never created a language that helps them figure that out. This simple assertion has really put Noam Chomsky's knickers in a twist, because it contradicts his widely accepted theories, "according to which all human languages have a universal grammar that form a sort of basic rules enabling children to put meaning and syntax to a combination of words."
The article continues:
Whether phonetics, semantics or morphology -- what exactly makes up this universal grammar is controversial. At its core, however, is the concept of recursion, which is defined as replication of a structure within its single parts. Without it, there wouldn't be any mathematics, computers, philosophy or symphonies. Humans basically wouldn't be able to view separate thoughts as subordinate parts of a complex idea.And there wouldn't be subordinate clauses. They are responsible for translating the concept of recursion into grammar. Renowned US psychologist Pinker believes that if the Piraha don't form subordinate clauses, then recursion cannot explain the uniqueness of human language -- just as it cannot be a central element of some universal grammar. Chomsky would be refuted.
But it freaks me out too because on my mission I had this weird experience:
I was startled one day about two months into my mission [yes, missionaries learn languages very quickly--immersion and "the gift of tongues" help with that] to realize that I understood enough Chinese to follow a conversation without mentally translating everything I heard back into English. One part of my mind got over the surprise very quickly and went on with the discussion, but another part remained astonished that suddenly there was something instantly apprehensible in the sounds and structures of Chinese; I recognized it as simultaneously a foreign language and a familiar idiom. But I was even more astonished a moment later to realize that while my comprehension had grown to include Chinese, my expression hadn't. My mind was no longer operating in translation mode, and that meant I couldn't talk. If I had stopped, commanded my mind to form my thoughts in English, to translate them into Chinese, and then spoke, I could have said something, but my thoughts were coming too rapidly and in some form that was neither English nor Chinese. The investigator said something to me, I opened my mouth to respond--my muscles, like my mind, knew I was having thoughts, and prepared to express them--but NOTHING came out. I knew I was having thoughts, but they weren't in any language that could be articulated--and once I realized that, it was all I could do not to cry, because I felt so bereft and lonely.
That was in, let's see, September 1985; in June 1986
another missionary sought me out because my skills as a speaker of French were required. Two Parisians had shown up at our chapel, two French Catholics who had come to the Mormon Church looking for the Taichung Confucian Temple, and I was enlisted to talk to them since they spoke neither English nor Chinese. I understood everything they said to me, but every time I opened my mouth to answer, the first few words out of my mouth were in French, after which the sentence finished itself in Chinese.It was as if my brain only had two modes: Native Tongue and Foreign Language, and the default drive on the Foreign Language was Chinese. I thought out in English what I wanted to say, translated it into French in my head to reassure myself that I indeed still knew the French, then spoke: "Follow this street till it ends, then turn left, and the temple is just ahead on your right." I started out competently enough in French: "Venez au fin de cette rue et tournez a gauche" but that was as far as I got before the rest of the speech spilled out in clipped Chinese syllables: "kung fudz dyan hen jin, dzai nide you byan."
The French couple was patient and polite and quite distraught when, after a few attempts, I gave up trying to speak French and simply started to cry. I walked with them in silence down the street until the temple was visible, then walked back, alone, to the chapel.
Ever since my mission I've been skeptical of the idea that all thought involves language--make that, I KNOW there are thoughts that don't involve language; otherwise, we couldn't LEARN a language, since we don't come into this world already fluent in any speech. But I've felt on a visceral level this strange thoughts-beyond-language state, and I felt it in a very weird and disconcerting way. But of course, these thoughts I was having that weren't in any language were perhaps thoughts I was ABLE to have because I had already acquired a language that made such thoughts possible, even if they didn't have an articulate-able (articulable?) verbal dimension...?
I don't know. It's very interesting. And if you follow a chain of links, beginning with this one, you'll eventually get to a very long paper on whether or not learning a second language changes your personality--I won't link directly to it myself because it's a massively huge pdf file and trying to access something so large always freezes my poor little computer, which is connected to the internet via dialup. (I know, I know, I'm the last person in the country to use dialup. But it's free, and I'd rather buy expensive shoes than fast internet connection.)
Thanks, Spike, for sending me the link to the story.
This article on the Piraha tickles something in my memory about it being a hoax. I can't find anything on google about that, however, so I may be wrong. Maybe I've got this Everett guy conflated with Carlos Castenada.
Your experience with Chinese and French is interesting, and you are not alone. I do the same thing -- my mom was German so I grew up bilingual for the first few years. I've taken French and Spanish in school, so I'm familiar with other languages. Now, if someone speaks to me in Spanish I can understand them pretty well but my automatic response is to reply in German. Like you said, it's almost like a default; not-English means Chinese in your case, and German for me.
Having your thoughts come to you in no particular language and then to pop out of your mouth in something that's supposed to be "foreign" to you is dizzying, isn't it? Is that what the immersion experience is supposed to be about?
To this day, the first words in my head for some things are in German, and I never did learn to sing "Silent Night" in English. I also failed German when I took it in college.
We have dial-up and no cable television because we'd rather spend the money on books, or trips to England. It's all in your priorities, right?
Hi Juti--
Glad to know that I'm not the only one who has experienced this "foreign-language default" thing. One of the perplexing things for me is that the default switched: when I first got to the MTC and had to learn Chinese, I had just finished a minor in French, and my French wasn't bad. So whenever someone would speak to me in Chinese, I would automatically answer in French, unless I first exerted a conscious act of will to answer in Chinese. But the really disconcerting thing about the experience I relate above is that even with the conscious act of will, the French wouldn't come forth--my tongue just couldn't access it. It was really weird, and disorienting, and unpleasant.
Glad to know also that I'm not really the last person in the world to use dialup, and I don't have cable tv either. I find both really easy to live without.
I've had an occasion or two to attempt to dredge up the vestiges of conversational Russian I studied 35 years ago, and it often comes out in Spanish. Which is odd, because my Spanish is pathetic.
Still on dial up! How can you live! I have DSL and go barefoot most of the time! I'm getting a new laptop with wi-fi soon, and then I'll be able to blog everywhere!
As to your topic here: I find that when I speak German my humor becomes ironic, and I use a lot more facial expressions. It seems necessary to show my audience how smart and with it I am.
"Conversation" in German is mostly getting the floor and defending it against other speakers. That means, being loud and decisive and looking your audience in the eye. Be prepared to argue your points. It's kind of fun, actually. You can be as blunt as you want, and no one really takes offense. It's kind of, so's your old man. Or oh yeah, sez you. Tactfulness and finesse or the quality of politesse in French do not resonate in German but simply seem a sign of stupidity or weakness. The one thing I don't like is that after a few days of speaking German my face gets tense and tired.
And I know what you mean about "default." I speak a little Spanish with a decided German accent!
When I read that article about Piraha, I immediately smelled a rat, even though I didn't know anything about Daniell Everett's unsavory reputation. I bet this will turn out to be a hoax.
It's a bit weird to lump all post-structuralists into one bag, but one position that most of them share is a rejection of correspondence or referential theories of language or of truth. That is to say that in their view, language does not produce meaning by referring to objects in the world; the word "cat" does not refer to any cat or any collection of animals with similar qualities, it refers to a concept that is produced through differentiation from other concepts. "Cat" means not-dog, or not-refrigerator, etc.
This has been a powerful and influential theory of language but one of its outcomes has been the idea that language makes the world (or "reality") by making our ability to conceive the world. But I'm not convinced by the theory because it makes a fetish out of language: it becomes a supernatural force that gives life, rather than a human artefact.
The notion that there is no possible thought outside of language strikes me as absurd on its face. We'd have to have a very expansive notion of what language is to reduce all thoughts to effects of language -- which makes this theory of language self-refuting: what would be not-language, that language could differ from? But in any case, in our daily lives we have thoughts that are not merely products of language, such as the music that runs through our heads or visual images or even those thoughts we write down and then must revise because the words didn't quite get it right.
I have not followed linguistics for some time and so I was not aware of some of the controversies surrounding Everett (but they don't really surprise me). What I found interesting in the story was the dynamic between the anthropologists and the Pirahã: he wants to teach them to count! Why? And do they fail to learn because they have no conceptions of quantity, or because they resent the intrusion? After all, Amazonian Indians have not had the happiest of contacts with outsiders over the last few centuries.
I'm bilingual, Spanish and English. I haven't been able to exercise my Spanish muscles much lately. I do notice that the world looks different in a second language -- so we can't go so far as to say that language has no effect at all on thought -- and I can also confirm Holly's experiece about a "default" position: when I first tried to learn French, I tended to say Spanish words with a French accent
I have also had that strange experience that you have had, Holly, where thoughts come in no language in a situation where the question of what language mode your brain is in, is not clear. The only other time I experience that kind of thing is during unusual leaps of understanding where my mind makes calculations that I cannot keep up with and a conclusion is drawn so quickly - like a sudden recognition but slowed down ever so slightly so that the workings of the "sudden" part can be glimpsed momentarily. It is an odd sensation, but I get the impression that if I could think like that more often, I would be much smarter. In a way language limits thought, once we have learned it.
On foreign languages, I also used to think that I only had an English mode and a non-English mode, which at different times in my life was French, Spanish then French again. I seem to have overcome that by learning Dutch, one of the two official languages of the city I live in (the other is French). I am immensely proud of this achievement as I'm not a good linguist (and speak to me in either French or Dutch and you will soon realise that). But learning a new language does change you - you have to learn to express yourself in different ways because a lot of things do not translate directly. It certainly enriches the mind.
Switching between the languages for me requires enormous mental concentration and I find myself doing "exercises" when I know I will have to switch from one language to another... I have to start thinking in that language and planning all the different possibilities of things I might want to say in the given situation. I find this helps stop the problem of starting in one language and finishing in another... usually!
What I found interesting in the story was the dynamic between the anthropologists and the Pirahã: he wants to teach them to count! Why? And do they fail to learn because they have no conceptions of quantity, or because they resent the intrusion? After all, Amazonian Indians have not had the happiest of contacts with outsiders over the last few centuries.
Good point, Spike.
I also like this point from Matt:
The only other time I experience that kind of thing is during unusual leaps of understanding where my mind makes calculations that I cannot keep up with and a conclusion is drawn so quickly - like a sudden recognition but slowed down ever so slightly so that the workings of the "sudden" part can be glimpsed momentarily. It is an odd sensation, but I get the impression that if I could think like that more often, I would be much smarter. In a way language limits thought, once we have learned it.
I envy you that acquisition of a fourth spoken language, Matt, and the way it seems to have helped you keep the various languages straight. I learned to speak both French and Mandarin, and I tackled a little German--had to learn to do translations in it for grad school.
The problem of languages jumbling together isn't nearly as bad as it once was--I've forgotten so much Chinese, for one thing, and I don't have much call to speak either Mandarin or French. I think I lapsed into Chinese a few times when I was with you in Paris last November, Matt, but mostly I think I just spoke crappy French whenever you weren't willing to step in with your far superior French.