”WHAT’S IN a name? That which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet” said Juliet about Romeo (Shakespeare, 2004, originally 1597).
Underpinning this cry from the heart is the seductive idea that despite all the atrocious rumours and warnings Juliet may have heard about the Montague family, she still sees Romeo in his true form and is able to cast aside the negative and fallacious image her community has built around the young rival. Somehow, just like a pearl diver when harvesting pearls, Juliet dove through depths of meaning to reach a place of clarity and truth. What matters is not so much the name of a thing – the language that surrounds it – but rather the thing itself, considered objectively. As if language was muddying waters we otherwise could plainly see with our innocent eyes and mind. Is it really possible to dive so deep as to get rid of this blurring socially determined language to finally think clearly, universally about the world?
In other words, is there such a thing as thinking without language, as thought without words? Or is Juliet wrong and ignores how language is the very medium shaping our capacity to think?
A certain tradition – stretching at least from Aristotle, through Descartes to us – would have it that we humans all share some sort of universal common-sense, that differences in judgement, taste and language are but cultural and accidental variations. This tradition argues that humanity can have ”immediate experiences” (Descartes 1999, originally 1637) which are considered truer, more reliable since nothing is here to filter them. Just like Saint Thomas (John 20:25, King James) we should only really believe what our senses can gather. However, Popper (2009) debunked this conception: the eye of a newborn is already full of biases brought about by evolution. Red is a peculiar colour for our eyes, because of how critical it was to distinguish it for our survival. In Popper’s terms, ”theory” – that is to say a form of language, even biological like DNA– pervades everything, and with it its biases. So ‘common sense’ and ‘immediate experiences’ do not appear as plausible leads to ‘think’ or ‘consider’ the world that surrounds us with absolute innocence. However, if our innocent eyes are not so innocent, is there still room for some sort of thinking preceding language however fraught with biological biases?
Do pre-linguistic babies share universal concepts?
A 2004 psychological study led by Susan Hespos and Elizabeth Spelke at Vanderbilt University showed that babies, although born in English speaking households, were paying more attention than adults to some categories their future mother tongues tended to ignore. English spatialises things by saying that something is on or in something whereas Korean expresses whether one item touches another in a tight or loose way (consider a spoon in a teacup as opposed to the corkscrew of a bottle). This study demonstrated that English babies pay attention to the relation favoured by Korean semantics which is completely overlooked by English adult speakers. As the title claims to have found “conceptual precursors to language”, they promote the idea of a form of ‘thought’ as in spatial and relational awareness towards objects which does not entail the necessary use of language. However, such cognitions seem too weak to uphold the standards most researchers apply to ”thought” as in conscious thinking manipulating concepts and their meaning, culturally shaped. As such this study is not enough evidence to say whether or not thoughts are independent from language.
The so-called Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis has famously attempted to answer this question by positing that the language of a speaker will influence the individual’s perceptions and cognitions. Many experiments and studies have stemmed from it, not only to assess or challenge its validity but also to understand if language determines thoughts or if thoughts are more subtly tilted by the structures of an individual’s language (strong versus weak hypothesis). Whorf himself did not produce very solid evidence. According to Steiner (1975), “[t]he metalinguistics of Whorf have for some time been under severe attack by both linguists and ethnographers. It looks as if a good deal of his work cannot be verified” (p.89).
Linguistic influences on colour perception
It has been most famously challenged by Rosch Heider (1972) who found that Dani people (who only have arguably two to five words for colour classification) can still isolate colours just as well as English speakers who do have words conceptualising eight main ones. Rosch claimed that colours were universal, and that language did not impact human perception and how we think about colour. However, this study has been challenged in turn by several others, such as Roberson et al (2000), who pointed at shortfalls in Rosch’s work and demonstrated that speakers of a language with a given colour boundary – e.g. ‘green’/’blue’ for English vs ‘wor’ (some green) / ‘nol’ (green, blue and blue/purple ) in Berinmo – are better at remembering items that correspond to their linguistic boundary. Speakers of a language without the same ‘prism’ are less likely to remember items corresponding to this foreign filter. It suggests that language does indeed influence the way humans think and perceive their world.
However, myths loom around the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in the form of ‘untranslatable words’ that can supposedly only be really understood by ”correctly wired” native speakers. One should refrain from buying into such deceptions because “what cannot be translated can be reworded” (Robelein, 2015). Although Turkish can be said to not have a verb “to be” per se, it still manages to produce predicative sentences just as well as any other language. And although they have the word ‘yakamoz’ to refer precisely to the reflection of the moonlight on water, well, you have understood the meaning underpinning yakamoz and may well start borrowing it if you feel like it.
Of course Juliet’s claim is a beautiful cry of acceptance and open-mindedness fueled by love. But if ‘rose’ immediately musters ‘smell […] sweet’, it is because Juliet’s culture conveyed by her language tilts her towards the collocation. Humans cannot apprehend the world in a perfectly immediate fashion. Language, however fraught with cultural biases, appears as an effective way to grapple with our surroundings. The price to pay is to accept that our language structures our experience of the world and that we unconsciously have different focuses depending on the language we are using.
Inquiring into our own linguistically induced blind spots and shortcuts, crossing linguistic obstacles and building bridges might well be “what’s [truly] in a name”.
THEO AINLEY, English Language undergraduate (Erasmus), University of Chester (UK)
References
Robelin, J. (2015, 15 June). L’intraduisible. Noesis.
Hespos, S.J. and Spelke, E.S. (2004). Conceptual precursors to language. Nature, 430, pp. 453-456.
Language Debates 