Language on the Mind
How our words impact our worldview
Who hasn’t, in their study of other languages, found there to be striking and impressionable differences in the way certain phrases translate? The first second language I learned was German, when my military parents were stationed there and we lived on an Army base in Karlsruhe. Germans have a few words in their lexicon which can be referred to as “tapeworm words” — multiple words tied together in a row to create a new, longer, compound word. One example is the word for “speed limit,” which is famously lengthy: Höchstgeschwindigkeitsbegrenzung (high-speed-limitation). While this one translates quite literally, there are other German tapeworm words that evoke a sort of poetry, such as Kummerspeck — also known as “Grief Bacon.” You know, it’s that bacon you eat when you feel sad in order to feel less sad — also known, less poetically, as “emotional eating.” There are a few German phrases that we’ve adopted and mainstreamed into English — they are so overused that we may not even identify them as particularly poetic anymore. Schadenfreude (harm that gives joy) and wanderlust (probably no translation needed on the latter one for most folks) are two such words.
It was thinker Johann Georg Hamann who told us that “poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.” He also felt that because we have become so inundated with logic and science, we have lost a connection with language. Hamann saw language as the “very stuff of being.” As we see in Gary Lachman’s book, literary scholar and philosopher of language Owen Barfield saw that the way we use language has a direct effect on our consciousness. Language from earlier periods, which is often more figurative, as well as lyric poetry, is “expressing a consciousness essentially different from our own.”
Barfield noticed that when he read poetry, it “had the power to change one’s consciousness a little.” He found that the same was true with translations from other languages, such as one translation from Latin: Cato, octoginta annos natus, exessit e vita. A friend of his translated this with a twist: “Cato, at the age of eighty, walked out of life.” Barfield found this last bit quite striking, offering a new meaning to the reality of death. What Barfield concluded was that “our ancestors didn’t see the same world” that we see, and thus did not use the same kind of language we use, in which we take the named objects around us for granted. Instead, as Gary Lachman tells us, our ancestors’ experience of the world may well have been “more visceral.”
As I’ve been (painfully) attempting to learn Turkish as a second second language in order to better communicate with my Turkish partner’s mother, I’ve encountered a few of these. A simple one is the Turkish word for “zoo”: hayvanat bahçesi. This translates directly to “animal garden.” The phrase brings a literal picture of animals in a garden to my mind, and I enjoy it much more than our English word. A different example is from a book my partner’s mother brought us called Dereden Tepeden. This somewhat rhymey title comes from the phrase dereden tepeden konuşmak, which translates as “to speak about streams and hills.” In other words, to make small talk. In Turkish, phrases such as these are known as atasözü, which means “words of our ancestors.” Even this label holds a special poetry!
Another such phrase is nazar değmesin, which translates to, “May you not be touched by the evil eye.” This is a phrase to be spoken after someone gives a compliment because the belief in the evil eye in this region is quite common. It’s said that the evil eye is one of jealousy and that if someone is too well-loved or has too many compliments given to them, it can attract this evil. Thus, the belief in carrying or hanging a nazar, or the nazar boncuğu or göz boncuğu (“eye bead”) in one’s home to ward off this potential threat. You’ve probably seen these — there is even an emoji for them on your phone. At the center of a dark blue circular ring is a light blue eye. The evil eye is not limited to Turkey, and can be seen all over that part of the world. Thus, the phrase nazar değmesin leads us to a whole backstory and cultural belief that is richly complex, yet instantly understood by those who use the phrase.
When American linguists looked more closely at languages spoken by Indigenous peoples of the Americas, they noticed that there were grammatic details present in these languages they had not seen before — such as indicators encoded in the grammar about the particular shape of an object. What they noticed led them to eventually see that the way we speak also impacts the way we see the world. As Antonio Benitez-Burraco summarizes, essentially, our words “focus our perception, attention, and thought on specific aspects of the world.”
Another example is how language impacts our perception of time. In English, we use present, future, and past tense. Benitez-Burraco explains that in a language spoken in New Guinea, Yimas, past tense alone has four different tenses, each one referring to how recently in the past the event happened. Similarly, the Turkish language has a tense that English does not have — one that indicates not only when something happened, but who witnessed the event — whether it was witnessed directly by the speaker, or heard secondhand — or just deducted from evidence. For example, when telling someone that it rained last night, one might say, yağmur yağmış, which means that it’s wet outside and that there is evidence of rain, but it wasn’t witnessed directly. If someone actually saw the rain, they would say, yağmur yağdı, as in, “It rained and I was there.” This is categorized as “linguistic relativity,” in which we “have to pay attention to any meanings that are grammatically marked in that language,” and these meanings can have an impact on how things are seen on a day-to-day basis. These are more easily witnessed when moving between two languages and are not readily obvious to those for whom the language is native. This concept is referred to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, put forth by Benjamin Lee Whorf and Edward Sapir.
This line of thinking can take this same concept a bit deeper with “linguistic determinism.” Linguistic determinism argues that cultural differences in languages can greatly influence what broader world views a culture holds. In Edward Sapir’s words, “Human beings…are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society…The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group.” We can apply this hypothesis, and linguistic determinism, to the aforementioned idioms such as the Turkish nazar değmesin, or, “May you not be touched by the evil eye.” This one phrase holds an entire folk belief and cultural worldview, which is affirmed when the phrase is uttered.
Just as is true with the grammatical details that we notice through the lens of linguistic relativity, these cultural phrases appear especially intriguing to someone outside of the culture. In other words, they are more noticeable by people for whom the phrase is new. One of the many gifts of learning new languages is that we get to encounter these differences firsthand and allow ourselves to become struck with the freshness of that poetry!
Sources
Benitez-Burraco, Antonio. “How the Language We Speak Affects the Way We Think.” Psychology Today. February 2, 2017. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-biolinguistic-turn/201702/how-the-language-we-speak-affects-the-way-we-think.
Delin, Sevil. “30 Awesome Turkish Expressions to Know Before You Go.” Matador Network. December 21, 2016. https://matadornetwork.com/abroad/30-awesome-turkish-expressions/.
“German Loses Its Longest Word.” Interpreters and Translators, Inc. July 23, 2013. https://blog.ititranslates.com/2013/07/23/german-loses-its-longest-word/
Lachman, Gary. A Secret History of Consciousness. Lindisfarne Books: 2003.
Lachman, Gary. Lost Knowledge of the Imagination. Edinburgh, Floris Books: 2017.
Schaferhof, Nick. “18 Weird German Words You Won’t Believe Exist.” https://www.fluentu.com/blog/german/weird-german-words-vocabulary/.
