After my post on words we hate–which yielded an awesome comment thread about not just nit-picky word-hating, but on language itself–I lucked into a fascinating article in Newsweek about how which language we speak may actually shape our perceptions and abilities. Lera Boroditsky, a psychologist at Stanford, has been conducting a series of experiments into whether which language we speak affects our perception and cognition.
In a series of clever experiments guided by pointed questions, she is amassing evidence that, yes, language shapes thought. The effect is powerful enough, she says, that “the private mental lives of speakers of different languages may differ dramatically,” not only when they are thinking in order to speak, “but in all manner of cognitive tasks,” including basic sensory perception. “Even a small fluke of grammar”—the gender of nouns—”can have an effect on how people think about things in the world,” she says.
When the Viaduct de Millau opened in the south of France in 2004, this tallest bridge in the world won worldwide accolades. German newspapers described how it “floated above the clouds” with “elegance and lightness” and “breathtaking” beauty. In France, papers praised the “immense” “concrete giant.” Was it mere coincidence that the Germans saw beauty where the French saw heft and power? In German, the noun for bridge, Brücke, is feminine. In French, pont is masculine. German speakers saw prototypically female features; French speakers, masculine ones. Similarly, Germans describe keys (Schlüssel) with words such as hard, heavy, jagged, and metal, while to Spaniards keys (llaves) are golden, intricate, little, and lovely. Guess which language construes key as masculine and which as feminine?
There are some other significantly more mind-blowing examples in that article–check out the bit about Australian Aboriginal language and its effect on navigational skills–but it was this gender issue that intrigued me. The issue of gender, sexism and language kept coming up in the comment thread on my original post. I think it’s obvious that language can be a tool of sexism–being the primary form of human communication, language is a tool of every “ism”–but, paradoxically, we were arguing that point in one of the few Western languages that’s linguistically gender neutral.
Consider: English is a linguistic mash-up of two gendered language groups: the Germanic and the Romantic. Unlike its parent languages, though, English nouns have no gender. The word bridge, unlike brücke and pont, is just…neutral. And with very rare exceptions (like calling a ship “she”), English doesn’t assign any gender-specific pronouns to common nouns.
Yet no one can make the argument that English speakers are therefore free of gender bias. The British Empire definitely did not encourage equality, even if the language it spread around the globe had a more egalitarian vocabulary than the ones spoken by other colonial powers. The Patriarchy is obviously still alive and well in English-speaking countries. But Lera Boroditsky’s studies would suggest that if German and French cultural perceptions are influenced by their gendered languages, surely our minds must somehow be influenced by the gender neutrality of English. Do we grow up less aware of male-female differences if we speak English? I wonder. I spent a lot of my childhood with people who spoke a gendered language–Spanish–and I noticed very early on that gender differences play a much larger role in their culture than it did in my own English-speaking one. I’m not sure I can attribute that entirely to language–but Pro. Borotditsky’s study makes me think that maybe language did have something to do with it.
What do you think? Be as biased as you like in the comments…
I’m not sure if anyone already brought this up in the last thread, but I remember reading an interesting article about gendering in scientific language i.e. an ovum is regarded as passive and sperm is regarded as active in reproduction. The article attributed this to sexism in science; applying feminine traits to the female component and masculine traits to the male.
I mentioned this to my dad who is a doctor and scientist and he was extremely dismissive of the argument, but there again he is an unreconstructed sexist at times…
As a linguistics major, I have to disagree that because English does not have gendered nouns or adjectives, English speakers are less sexist. Or, that Spanish speakers are more sexist.
For example, apple in Spanish (manzana) is feminine, but peach (duranzo) is masculine. As a westerner, I think of both of these things as feminine because the patriarchy has instilled the belief that females are sweet and light, just like fruit. Interestingly, carrot (zanahoria) is also feminine, even though it could be considered more of a representation of a phallus. So, gender assignment is arbitrary.
My point is that the gender assignment of words in Spanish did not necessarily develop due to sexism, and in my opinion, speakers whose language does assign gender to nouns and adjectives are even *less* sexist. Think about the word “sweet.” It is commonly used to describe feminine things, and yet the word itself is masculine.
Yet, language does influence and perpetuate sexism in other ways, but I should stop before I write you a freaking book…
@Maggie: So what do we make of the fact that in Spanish the noun “problema” is (irregularly) masculine and “solucion” is feminine? That always made me chuckle!
But it’s worth noting that in Spanish–actually, in all Romance languages–most words having to do with power/governance/strength, etc. are masculine.
I loved that article and made my husband read it right away so we could discuss it.
If I had to choose a superpower it would be the ability to think and speak in all human languages. Think of all the nuances someone like that could understand.
… and sexism is pretty intense in latin american circles that I am familiar with compared with the US, but less than in some other places. If I were to pick a cause, however, I would lean towards the Catholic Church I think.
@rodriguez: That is EXACTLY the superpower I would choose too! Think how easy travel would be.
I agree with you about the Catholic Church, although I don’t think it’s exclusively the reason for machismo (it probably goes a long way towards fueling the virgin/whore complex, tho.)
@becky Yes, the language is part of the sexism, and the RC Church is probably a bigger part still.
I am one of those rabid converts away from Catholicism (and all religions) and I always need to temper my desire to blame the RC Church for every bad thing.
Funny, besides language and religion can you think of another large cause for sexism? I would put any non-secular government into the religion category. Maybe body dimorphism?
@beckysharper
“But it’s worth noting that in Spanish–actually, in all Romance languages–most words having to do with power/governance/strength, etc. are masculine.”
true, but at the same time, their endings make up for it.
In English, “strong” and “tough” do not have gender-specific suffixes. and while we can certainly use these adjectives to describe the feminine, we typically dub it as a masculine trait in our lexicon.
In Spanish, however, “duro” has both a masculine and feminine ending, and in my opinion, it might be more natural to describe a feminine thing as tough because it has its own morphology. English doesn’t make use of much morphology outside of verbs, so we rely on semantics to tell us what the word “tough” usually describes.
Then again, I’m not a native speaker of Spanish or any other romance language, so I only have linguistic theory to go off of.
It is fun thinking about this stuff again, though…
@becky
“So what do we make of the fact that in Spanish the noun ‘problema’ is (irregularly) masculine and ‘solucion’ is feminine? That always made me chuckle!”
I have no idea. but I loled hard when I read that.
I’ve heard that theory before, but I have to say, I find it unconvincing.
I often find that the gender of the noun has nothing to do with stereotypes about it. In German, “Girl” and “Dress” (Mädchen/Kleid) are both neuter, for example, while “the hunt” is feminine (die Jagd).
It’s interesting that you say things to do with power and government are usually masculine in Spanish, too–that’s definitely not the case in German (power, strength, government, are all feminine), and not really in French either (liberty, equality, fraternity, justice are all feminine words…).
Or the same object can have different genders, even within the same language: it is “die Couch” but “das Sofa”.
I do think language can influence your thought, though–strongly declined languages like German force you to operate quite logically without even realizing it, while flowery, less direct ones like French leave more room for improvisation and beating around the bush. Although that’s kind of a chicken-and-egg question too, about what developed first, the language or culture…
Yeesh, this is way too long. I’m a language nerd, sorry!
So I’m an American living in Norway, and I’ve definitely thought about this (although they don’t really have gendered nouns). The Norwegian language has few words compared to English, and so often they will employ a word to mean two *wildly* different things that, if looked at sideways, could possibly make sense.
Example #1: “Mandel” is the Norwegian word for “Almond”. They also use it for “Tonsil” since apparently these two things look somewhat like each other.
Example #2: “Gift” (pronounced, “yift”) is the Norwegian word for “Marriage.” They also use it for “Poison.” Make of that what you will. (Now I’m not the marrying time, so this absolutely TICKLED me.)
“Time” should be “type.” Obviously. Oops.
@Milo: That’s hilarious. The marriage/poison thing is so classic. And aren’t marriage rates flatlining in Norway?
Mandel is also the Yiddish word for almond (which I know because my grandmother used to make mandelbrot to go with coffee).
@Endora: I know, I’m a language geek too, which is why I think all this stuff is so fascinating and all my friends are like…meh.
@milointheemeadow The number of words in a language is a really interesting parameter to consider. Becky mentioned last week that English is especially large. I think that must be the case for whatever the lingua franca (heh) is at the moment. It’s interesting that Norwegian has a small word count.
Does German also have a small word count, @Endora? The way some people describe it to me, I am guessing yes, as in the words for shoes and gloves and stuff: Handschuh?
well, Google says German does have lots of words
@rodriguez: English has by far the largest word pool of any language. A standard English dictionary has about 450k words. The OED lists half a million words and there are an estimated 500k technical terms and forms that are not listed (although an educated person uses only about 20k of those words). German has about 185k and French about 100k words.
English gets the massive word pool by borrowing so promiscuously from so many other languages and because it has roots in two separate language families (Germanic and Romantic), so it has double the vocab base.
/massive geek-out
Oh, this is such an interesting and complex subject. I don’t know if I entirely agree, but I do think that the language we speak can intenvene on the way we think (or at least were ‘programmed’ to think).
I just don’t have an opinion about the gender bias. I think I’m gonna have to agree with rodriguez and Becky: I blame Catholic Church, and also patriarchy and other facts in History of Latin America over Language – which, in my case, is Portuguese (pretty similar to Spanish).
Regardless, this whole reading and thinking here made me go to one of my all-time favorite books, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. And I found and excerpt online that I think is poorly translated but it will suit nicely the whole idea of language defining our primary thoughts and feelings, as well as the way we perceive things.
“All languages that derive from Latin form the word compassion by combining the prefix
meaning with (corn-) and the root meaning suffering (Late Latin, passio). In other languages — Czech, Polish, German, and Swedish, for instance — this word is translated by a noun formed of an equivalent prefix combined with the word that means feeling(Czech, sou-cit; Polish, wspol-czucie; German, Mit-gefuhl; Swedish, med-kansia).
In languages that derive from Latin, compassion means: we cannot look on coolly as others suffer; or, we sympathize with those who suffer. Another word with
approximately the same meaning, pity (French, pitie; Italian, pietà; etc.), connotes a certain condescension towards the sufferer. To take pity on a woman means that we are better off than she is, that we stoop to her level, lower ourselves.
That is why the word compassion generally inspires suspicion; it designates what is
considered an inferior, second-rate sentiment that has little to do with love. To love someone out of compassion means not really to love.
In languages that form the word compassion not from the root suffering but from the
root feeling, the word is used in approximately the same way, but to contend that it designates a bad or inferior sentiment is difficult. The secret strength of its etymology floods the word with another light and gives it a broader meaning: to have compassion (co-feeling) means not only to be able to live with the other’s misfortune but also to feel
with him any emotion — joy, anxiety, happiness, pain. This kind of compassion (in the sense of souc/r, wspofczucie, Mitgefuhl, medkansia) therefore signifies the maximal capacity of affective imagination, the art of emotional telepathy. In the hierarchy of sentiments, then, it is supreme.”
I have to make a confession now: the first time I read that, I felt sorry for my Latin heritage.
@Milo: The double-use of words is really interesting! “Mandel” is both tonsil and almond in German, too, though… Medical words in German are actually really funny, there are almost always two words, a scientific one and a German one (Diarrhöe and Durchfall–which literally means fall-through, since that’s what it does–for diarrhea, for example).
@Becky: Glad you’re a language geek too, makes me less worried about boring you!
@rodriguez: The German word count is actually really hard to determine, because you can string words together at will to make a new one. The German wikipedia gives the example of “Kartoffelbrei”. In German, it is one word that means “mashed potato”. To get the same idea, you need two words in English, and 5 (purée de pommes de terre) in French. Anyway, Wikipedia says that officially, English has between 500,000 and 600,000 words, German a bit less, and French roughly 300,000 (the last statistic probably due to the fact that, as shown above, French uses a series of words to express what English or German could do in one).
@Becky: interesting that your stats are so different! Just goes to show, I guess, that depending on how you gather them and on what you want to find out, numbers can show you all kinds of different things!
@Endora: My source on those numbers was from McCrum, Cran & Neil’s book THE STORY OF ENGLISH (I don’t have a link-I actually have the book on my shelf and pulled it). But for stats on the English word pool, here are the Oxford geeks:
http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutenglish/mostwords?view=uk
@Becky: Sorry, didn’t mean to accuse you of choosing dodgy stats at all, I just re-read my comment and realized it could have sounded that way. All I meant is that so-called experts, depending on their backgrounds (i.e. it makes sense Germans would want to play up the size of German!), will often find different numbers. It’s always interesting to see that in practice. The source German wikipedia cites for those word-count stats I quoted is old (1969), and is a PhD dissertation, so yours are probably more reliable!
The words “strong” “tough” “powerful” etc. are all adjectives, and in Spanish and French, as well as other languages with gendered nouns, they become masculine or feminine to match the noun.
as for the German article describing the French bridge, well, perhaps French people are the ones who have to look at this immense thing towering over their landscape each day…while the Germans are free to admire the architectural beauty of a construction that is not in their immediate environment. I mean the French are the same people who got stuck with an Eifel tower that we all love and they all hated. It was supposed to be temporary, but it stayed and stayed and they were stuck with it. Also, the strength of the French writer’s “bridge” and the beauty of the German writer’s “bridge” could also just be due to personal tastes and viewpoints. Either way, it would take more examples to show a pattern.
By the way, “vagin”, vagina, is masculine in French. Yes, I looked it up in the French-English dictionary in HS cause when you’re a kid that’s what you do ;p