How Language Lets You (Or Makes You) Think Differently
I find myself wondering on an almost weekly basis what life would be like without language. There have been such times of course, both for each of us individually and for all of us as a species, but both of these are distant, one blurred by memory, the other by history. We all think and internalize things in slightly different fashions: while some think clearer in words, others think in large part through images. It’s been well documented that people affected by conditions such as dyslexia think non-verbally, and perhaps if existing languages were not at our disposal, this would be the case for all of us. I’m a verbal thinker, and I can’t speak for everyone, nor can I hope to give some definitive, scientific answer to a debate that has gone on for decades — if there even is one — but what I can say with some confidence is that I would not have been able to have the more complex thoughts that I have today had I not the words to express them.
I should probably provide some background here. I’m not a native English speaker, but I’ve studied it to some degree or other for the larger parts of my life. I’ve also spent half a year in Japan, and studied Japanese for some time. I’d say this latter had the most profound effect on me, but more accurately it was the case in which I was more acutely aware of the effect it was having on me as it was happening. My mother tongue, Norwegian, is also on the Germanic branch of the language tree; it’s different from English, but it’s also not that different. There are other Germanic languages from which I can intuit all or parts of the meaning from knowledge of my mother tongue alone, and while English is certainly not one of these, there are a lot of grammatical and syntaxial similarities and its sounds has never appeared unpronounceable to my own tongue. Japanese is a different story though.
For starters, learning Japanese, with its own alphabets, also required me to learn to read all over again, something I hadn’t done since grade school. This is another area in which the distance created by time might diminish the effects of our earlier language learning experiences. Do you remember — clearly remember — when you first read your first sentence, your first paragraph? Do you remember the feeling of — for the first time ever — being able to translate mere scratches on paper to ideas and meaning in your head? Despite my love of reading, I didn’t. I learned both reading and writing during my childhood, and like so much else from early life the experience had become muddled and stretched by time. There’s also the fact that learning, like most things in life, is a process and not an event, but there is still that moment when the words first start flowing, slowly, and with pauses most likely, but flowing nonetheless. The web of pencil strokes feels like its laid bare to you. More than that, it feels like the entirety of the written language is laid open before you: you have cracked the code, and now the world’s knowledge is available to you in its entirety. This isn’t entirely rational of course. Given more complex vocabulary and grammar you’re apt to be stumped, but I don’t think that does — or should — diminish the feeling.
Reading aside, the effects of learning an entirely different language was tremendous, and should that really come as a surprise? Verbal thinker or not, you’d be hard put to convince me we’re not affected by the words with which we communicate. At the most mundane we have curse words, which in a language like English are mostly represented by words that by today standards have little to no bad meaning, but is rather based on old taboos. (Swapping some of the most common of these with any of their more accepted synonyms for example, like “discharge” and “coitus”, effectively makes it inoffensive in a lot of situations). Yet even these primitive words affect us, and while you might not be the type to recoil at offensive language, perhaps you’d find yourself involuntary wincing ever so slightly if it was spoken in the presence of a child, or perhaps in front of your grandmother, or whatever person in your life to whom saying these words seems unfitting.
More meaningful, yet perhaps still a bit elusive, is all the metaphorical meaning our language is loaded with. We humans can’t seem to help but turn to metaphors to explain or try to understand things, whether it’s about everyday life or the nature of our very existence. The way we end up doing this is made clear in each of our languages. We say we are “in” pain, just as we say we are in water, as if we are submerged in it, swimming in it, or sinking. We fall asleep, but we also fall in love, as if it’s something we physically stumble into, by carelessness or by letting oneself fall. We “keep” promises, having them shared with us to then be tucked away safely in a pocket or a drawer. Our language is awash in metaphorical expressions.
The words of our language and how their sounds and concepts relate inevitably makes us draw connections in our mind to some degree as well. It can be telling therefore, when looking at a language, what the originators of the language found important and related, but also what current users of the language might find important and related due to their use of the language. We’ve been trying to make sense of the world by telling stories since the dawn of time and we’re stilling doing it, and much like many of our thoughts about the world (what’s wrong and right, etc.) is shaped by stories, so is our language. In English, a fair part of the vocabulary has its origins in Greek mythology: atlas, a book of maps, has its name from the titan sentenced to carry the world on his shoulders; when we say something is chronological or chronic we evoke the name of the god of time, Chronos; those who’ve read Homer’s the Odyssey may also remember that the name of the character to whom Odysseus trusts the education of his son is Mentor, a name we now speak and write commonly to describe teachers or those who guide us. In English you’ll find that many of these are eponyms — nouns formed after a person, character, or entity’s name — and whether these in specific are helpful or not is debatable, but it’s also dependent upon the individual. Some may find that their words make more sense knowing that they are rooted in stories and gods of old, while others, especially those unfamiliar with the Greek pantheon, are apt to use these same words while knowing nothing of the characters and stories that come with them. Helpful or not, the image of these gods and characters are likely to come to the forefront of your mind when their respective eponyms are spoken, voluntary or otherwise, if you have a familiarity with their mythos and stories.
Exemplifying what I want here will require me to delve a little into another language (in this case Japanese). I’ll try to keep it short and concise so bear with me here.
Chinese characters bring this connection of words and concepts into greater clarity, because here it is also infused into the writing itself, unlike with languages using the Latin alphabet. These characters have been adapted by both Japanese and Korean, though it is the Japanese adoption, kanji, with which I am personally the most familiar and therefore will refer to here. Kanji, and Chinese characters in general, are logograms. This means each individual character holds the meaning of a word, a concept, or a phrase, rather than only a phonetic meaning as with the Latin alphabet. Where a letter in the Latin alphabet corresponds to a single sound, a single kanji may in itself hold the meaning of an entire word, or more often a concept that may mean several different words depending on the context in which it is used. The reading of a character may also change depending on the context in which it used, and I should mention here that Japanese also have two other writing systems (hiragana and katakana) which have phonetic meanings and thus can be used on its own or to describe the reading of a kanji, but it is still kanji characters that predominantly appears in writing. For an example, have a look at the following kanji, which by itself means “person”: 人. Though there exist tens of thousands of kanji, 2136 is the number commonly cited that sees regular, everyday use, and only those particularly well-read know upwards of 5–6000.
This results in a few major fascinating differences from the Latin alphabet. For starters, you (and several native Japanese speakers as well) may find that they can read the meaning of a word or sentence, yet cannot phonetically read or pronounce it. Of course an English speaker may come across a word that they’re unsure of how to pronounce, especially so if said word is in a different language or has its origins in one, but looking at the word alone will generally give the reader an idea of how it is pronounced provided the reader has a good understanding of English and the Latin alphabet. Unless you have any prior experience with Japanese writing on the other hand, you now know that 人 means “person”, yet you have no idea how to even begin to pronounce it; you don’t even know what or how many syllables it consists of.
Furthermore, kanji can be combined to create new meanings in a way that the Latin alphabet only does with sound. One way meaning is combined is simply by combining characters in the same way that English might combine existing words to create compound words: we can intuit that a cabdriver is a driver of cabs, and that a rowboat is a boat one rows to move. But English compounds are often inconsistent and therefore require knowledge of their common use case to be properly understood. “Lighthouse” refers to a house which gives off light, “moonlight” refers to the light given off by the moon, but “headlight” refers specifically to the lamps at the front of a car. “Firefighter” is used to mean a person who fights fires, but “freedom fighter” is commonly used to mean a person who fights for freedom. Partly due to the phonetic nature of the writing system, you’re also far more likely to come across entirely different words that serve to combine the meaning of two other words without containing any of the original words. “Adult”, for example, is simply a grown-up person, and “poet” is a person who writes poetry. In Japanese, 詩 is the character for poetry. Keeping in mind that 人 is the kanji for person, you might be able to read that 詩人 (poetry + person) means “poet” without any further knowledge of the language, and also while still having no idea how to speak said word.
So what’s the point of this? Am I saying Japanese makes it easier to know what gods in the culture’s respective pantheon are related to what element or word? Sure I am, but there are connections to be made outside of mythology as well, and making and seeing connections is an important part in understanding how the world works. For an example of this that is at least to some degree applicable to English and Scandinavian languages as well, let’s look at the word “moon”.
It’s a basic word, and one often learnt very early in life, but it’s also obviously an important one: the moon brightens our nights, it creates tides, humans and animals alike have used its cycles to mark time for thousands of millennia, and still to this day it defines our calendar months. In English, we have the word “month” and “moon” sharing the same origin (they are so called “cognates”), in Norwegian the word for moon is “måne” while the word for month is “måned”, and in German moon is “mond” and month is “monat”. There’s an orthographic similarity here, but I wouldn’t blame you not for picking up on it, even less so given the fact that you probably learned these words and their meaning as a child. In fact, it’s quite possible for someone to go on knowing these words for many years before learning their relation, and — depending on one’s access to education — some might never discover some of them. In Japanese, the character for moon is “月”. As it happens, 月 is also the character for month. The two are linguistically intertwined in a way that is impossible not to discover by the time one starts learning their letters. Here’s another interesting facet with the Chinese characters: in addition to being used together like we would compound words, the simpler kanji are also used as parts of more intricate kanji, giving the reader an opportunity to intuit the meaning even when encountering a character they have never seen before. The character for “tide” or “current” is “潮”, the right-hand side of which is made up of the character for moon (the left-hand side contains, among other things, the kanji for water). If this is the kind of language you’re learning as you’re growing up and learning about the world, the moment you see the word “tide”, you may already have an idea what it is, and once you know what it is, there’s a chance you’ll already be asking yourself about its relation to the moon.
Where the problems arise here in English and a lot of other languages (Japanese by no means being exempt from this either), is when these connections between words and sounds don’t make sense or are simply not helpful to our understanding of the things the words are used to name or describe. English is riddled with homonyms. If I told you there was a bat in my room, you’d have no way of knowing from that statement alone whether I was referring to the kind of bat you’d hit a ball with or the furry, nocturnal creature. If I said I picked the right way, it would be unclear whether I simply picked the right way as opposed to the left, or whether I picked the correct way, yet the two may be the opposite of one another. Homonyms with different spelling, though more distinguishable, also do little to help our understanding, e.g. “site”, “sight”, “cite”. Yet I don’t think these can be dismissed. Though unintentional, there’s going to be a connection there. It might be weak, or it might be strong, but if you have severe chiroptophobia (fear of bats), the word “bat” is likely to set off some negative feelings for you even when you know you’re talking of the object and not the animal.
I won’t even get into how these unintentional affiliations might be formed or enforced when you’re bilingual, but suffice to say, knowing two languages that share some grammar and words and yet having some words that also mean two completely different things in each language might affect your choice of words. These are easier to distinguish when they’re in separate languages, but the meaning of the word in your mother tongue does tend to have a prevailing impact. For example, a Norwegian might find the English word “present” more positive and innocent than “gift”, seeing as the latter in Norwegian means “poison”. (Incidentally, this Norwegian word for poison is also the past tense of the verb “married”, the implications of which I also won’t get into here.)
Which in the end brings me back to my experience in Japan, where I’d find myself increasingly thinking in Japanese, often having inner monologues in an attempt to more effectively learn the language and have the words come more naturally when speaking, only to then find myself thinking of things that I otherwise would not, or thinking of it in different ways. If that still seems odd to you, just think of how much mere phrasing within a single language might affect how you perceive what is being talked or written about: was your friend being laid back or lazy, was your boss aggressive or simply assertive, would you say your parents were curious or nosy? On a few occasions during my stay I’d been engaged in conversations that to me had been immensely interesting. Part of what lead me to consider these issues of language in the first place, was that as I later tried to recount the exact points and arguments that had been made during said conversations to a friend or family member in English or Norwegian, they no longer seemed as interesting or poignant as they had in Japanese. It hadn’t just been a thing of the moment; I could still recount the conversation and run the things spoken of through in my head after all, and doing so — in Japanese — still left me feeling very much intrigued. There were connections there that seemed inherit that I found difficult or heavy-handed to explain in other languages, connections of which I have here only given the very most blatant and simplistic examples of which I could come up with. Don’t get me wrong, learning and using a new language in and of itself can be immensely rewarding and fun, but there was something more there, something that also made me think more closely on why and when my mind would turn to English during a thought process, and when it would formulate itself in my mother tongue.
I know language isn’t the be-all and end-all of all thought. I know that learning a new language may both seem and be a daunting task, and I know that simply learning one isn’t necessarily going to instantly turn your entire world view on its head, sending biblical rays of sunshine down upon your outstretched hands as you now see the world for what it truly is. But I also believe it can make a huge difference, and more importantly I think it can be immensely helpful to be able to think and speak of the world and your place in it in multiple ways. I know the experience might not be the same for everyone and that the linguistic distance from the language learned relative to your mother tongue will have a say in the difference it makes, but I’m also confident I’m not the only one whose life and thoughts has been greatly affected by learning new languages, and that many have had the same experience before me, and that more still will have it in the future.
I’d encourage anyone with an interest to take up learning a new language whenever one can make time, or go back to a language you once learned some of, but in which you now only remember a few greetings and the most basic of phrases. Language is so much more than greetings after all; it’s a way of addressing and thinking about the world. I know my own desire to keep learning remains firm, even if just for the pure and exhilarating joy of turning scratches on a page into ideas in my head.
If you are looking for language partners to improve your foreign language skills you can find one for free at swaplanguage.com. Additionally, you can join our weekly free live Spanish and Danish lessons. Grammar, vocabulary and culture, taught by native speakers.
