The powers of language

UNESCO Courier, March, 1986 by Claude Hagege

The powers of language

FOR the sake of simplicity, let us divide the powers of language into two categories: internal and external. The former concerns language as a system and its relationship with those who use it and whose attitudes of mind and activities are shaped by it. The latter has to do with the use of language in the activity of speech or parole, and the capabilities that this confers on its users.

Language is older than the individual. From birth to adulthood, we have no choice but to learn it. True, the individual can also steer language in a particular direction: indeed, it is he who shapes it and causes it to change by the way in which he uses it. But this process is spread over very long periods. In what linguists call synchrony, that is, the time in which the user is actually living, he seems to be a receptive substance on which language stamps its indelible imprint. That imprint shows itself in two essential ways: in representation of the real world, and in the sphere of psycho-social symbolism and nationalism.

We can all see for ourselves, in our daily lives, that different languages construct different images of the universe. Far from mirroring the world's phenomena in a way that is universally identical, languages tend to organize them acoridng to their own ever-changing systems of classification, reinventing and even creating them so that they exert considerable influence over the way in which each community thinks about these phenomena.

Some would even claim that there is a causal link between language and world-view. Such a link, for example, provides the basis for the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, named after two twentieth-century linguists who most openly defended it. "It is quite an illusion," wrote Edward Sapir (1884-1939), "to imagine the one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language, and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of different cultural groups." Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941), Sapir's pupil, believed that we cut up nature along "the lines drawn by out language (...) No individual is free to describe nature with absolute impartiality; on the contrary, he is forced to submit to certain modes of interpretation, even when he believes he is free." Whorf adds that the Hopi Indians, who live on the desert plateaux of northern Arizona, are quite unable to imagine such places as heaven or hell as described by missionaries.

The Jesuits in China ran into difficulties which were probably similar. Their experience prompts a number of doubts about the universality of the ten grammatical categories which Aristotle established and which are still used as guidelines for research by many linguists. "What Aristotle gives us as a checklist is merely the conceptual projection of a particular linguistic state (...) Beyond the terms of the Aritotelians, and transcending this categorization, there stretches the concept of 'being' which encompasses everything (...). Greek not only has a verb 'to be' (which is by no means a necessity in every language), but it has developed wholly distinctive uses for this verb."

So we find that the existence of a verb "to be" in Greek and the way in which Greek maps out grammatical categories in the universe of the sayable have given rise to the grammar which is used by all Western linguists and which is artificially overlaid on the languages of other parts of the world. Fathr Matteo Ricci could find nothing better tht the expression "Lord of the Sky" to make the concept of God acceptable to the Chinese. He encountered a very thorny problem in his attempts at adaptation, for "Chinese thought (...) does not deal in positive and negative, being and non-being, but in contraries which follow one another in succession, combine and complement one another (...). Using the Chinese language brings other thought processes into play, and develops other abilities, than those which have been given pride of place in the West". The same problem arose concerning the concept of substance, of the adjective (which is a verb in Chinese), and of everything in language which gives form to representation.

We all pay less attention to that which our language does not name, even it we are quite capable of conceiving of it. The power of objects and concepts over individual is much greater when language gives them a name than when it does not. Nevertheless, this power of language should not be over-estimated. We may feel some reservations at Nietzche's enthusiasm when he writes, in order to explain (the strange family resemblance shared by all Hindu, Greek and German thought", that "when there is linguistic kinship, it is inevitable that a common grammatically-based philosophy (...) predisposes thought to produce philosophical systems which develop along the same lines". All we can say, and this is already a large claim, is that the parallels between language structures and thought patterns in substantially differing cultures are sufficiently regular to appeal to the observer's imagination.