The linguist Guy Deutscher, in Through the Language Glass (2010), concluded that the language we speak does affect how we think, but not by stopping us from thinking anything. Following Franz Boas and Roman Jakobson, he argued that languages differ in what they oblige their speakers to say, and that those obligations, repeated every day, become habits of mind that can shape memory, perception and even practical skills, as with the Guugu Yimithirr of Cape York, whose language has no left or right. Words have power and shape how we perceive the world, so they are worth choosing with care.
Who is Guy Deutscher? #
An Israeli linguist, born in Tel Aviv in 1969, who studied mathematics and then linguistics at the University of Cambridge. He has been a fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge, and worked on the languages of ancient Mesopotamia at the University of Leiden, and is an honorary research fellow at the University of Manchester. His books are Syntactic Change in Akkadian (2000), The Unfolding of Language (2005), on how languages grow and change, and Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages (2010), which was shortlisted for the Royal Society’s science book prize. He set out its argument for a wider audience in a 2010 essay in The New York Times Magazine, “Does Your Language Shape How You Think?”1
What question was he asking? #
Whether language is part of human nature or part of culture, and how far it reaches into the mind. Deutscher was interested in the everyday cultural habits so deeply printed on us that we take them for nature, the places where, in his phrase, culture masquerades as human nature.2 He began with colour. In 1858 the scholar, and later prime minister, William Gladstone noticed how strange Homer’s colours are: the famous “wine-dark sea”, and no word at all for blue. The long argument this started, over whether people in other times and places saw colours differently, ended in the finding that people everywhere can see the same shades, but that languages divide them up in different ways, and that which colours get names follows what a culture needs to talk about.3
What did he reject, and what did he put in its place? #
He rejected the idea that a language is a prison-house that limits what its speakers can understand, the strong form of what is often called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. No language, on the evidence, prevents its speakers from grasping a thought that another language expresses easily.4 See What did Sapir and Whorf actually claim about language and thought?
In its place he put a principle from the anthropologist Franz Boas, summed up by the linguist Roman Jakobson: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” English obliges its speakers to mark whether something happened in the past; other languages oblige theirs to mark other things, such as whether a noun is masculine or feminine. Because speakers have to attend to these things every time they speak, Deutscher argued, “such habits of speech can eventually settle into habits of mind with consequences for memory, or perception, or associations, or even practical skills.”4
What did he find about the Guugu Yimithirr? #
His most striking case. Guugu Yimithirr is the language of an Aboriginal people of Cape York in north-eastern Australia, who once lived as hunter-gatherers around the Endeavour River. After settlers shot many of their camps out of existence in the 1870s and 1880s, a Lutheran mission, later moved inland to Hopevale, became a refuge for the survivors of the whole region, and Guugu Yimithirr became the language of that settled mission community of about a thousand people. It is there that linguists have studied it. Their language has no words for left and right, or in front and behind, as directions. Everything is placed by the points of the compass: there is an ant to the north of your foot, a cup on the southern edge of the table. To speak it at all, a person has to know at every moment which way is north. Its speakers did, unfailingly, in dense bush, in rooms without windows and after long, winding journeys, and they remembered events with the directions built in. The anthropologist Stephen Levinson recorded such feats among them.5
Deutscher was careful about the cause. It was not, he argued, forced on them by the land or by the hunter-gatherer way of life, since nothing in either prevents anyone from saying “in front of your foot”, and other Aboriginal languages in similar country use both kinds of direction. It was “a cultural convention”, and the remarkable skill followed from the habits of speech the convention demanded.5
What else did he find? #
Two smaller, well-tested effects. In languages with grammatical gender, the gender of a word colours the associations people make with the thing, though there is no evidence, in his account, that it affects anyone’s ability to reason logically.6 And Russian, which has two separate basic words for darker and lighter blue, siniy and goluboy, makes its speakers slightly quicker at telling apart two shades that fall on either side of that line. When the experiment was repeated whilst the participants recited a jumble of numbers aloud, keeping the language areas of their brains busy, the difference disappeared, which pointed to language as its cause.7
Does everyone agree with him? #
No. The linguist John McWhorter answered him directly in The Language Hoax (2014), whose subtitle, Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language, turns Deutscher’s round. McWhorter argues that such experiments show differences too small to tell us anything about what it means to be human, and mocks reaction-time gaps of a tenth of a second; on his view culture shapes language far more than language shapes thought. Reviewing the book, the linguist Peter Backhaus questioned whether measured differences in reaction time, which McWhorter himself accepts as real, should be ridiculed and dismissed so easily.8 Deutscher’s own claims sit between the two positions: real effects, mostly modest, arising from habits of attention, not from a prison of words.
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
In the power of words. Shamans are very clear that words shape how we experience reality.9 The language we use moulds the way we perceive and relate to the world, and the culture’s spell that up is good and down is bad has seeped deep into everyday language, from ‘higher’ consciousness to calling someone ‘a bit of an animal’ as an insult.10 The word ‘civilisation’ does the same work, teaching everyone who uses it that city-based cultures are better than the hunter-gatherer cultures before them, a ‘fact’ most people never question.11 Deutscher’s culture masquerading as nature is a close description of how such words work.
The Boas-Jakobson principle also throws light on a shamanic practice. A Power AnimalPower Animal. The Oversoul of a wild species, met as a single Lower-World being and bonded with in a deep, committed, usually lifelong soul-bond of unconditional love. The practitioner’s first and foremost Guide: Panther, not “my panther”. Read the full answer is written and spoken of as Panther, Horse or Wolf, with a capital letter and no ‘a’, ‘the’ or ‘my’, because what it is called determines what is being related to: an individual middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer animal, or the wise, collective Oversoul from the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer.9 In recording journeys, “Next, Bear appeared” is written, not “Next, a bear appeared”; it is a small change in language with a large effect on what happens in journeys.12 In effect this is a grammar chosen on purpose, an obligation taken on every time a journeyer speaks, so that the habit of speech can become a habit of perception. See What is a Power Animal? and What part do silence, words and names play?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
In looking beyond language altogether. Deutscher’s subject is how one language compares with another. Language itself is largely a middle-world thing, and largely left-brained, a matter of labelling, defining and dividing the world up; the Lower-World is largely beyond language, the realm of metaphor and imagery, closer to poetry, painting or music.13 In journeying the aim is to go beyond language, into a deeper reality experienced through sensations, imagery and metaphor, and Lower-World GuidesGuides. The Lower-World and Upper-World beings a practitioner works with and learns from, of whom the Power Animal is the first and foremost. True Guides are ethical to their core; the shaman’s power comes from the depth of these bonds, not from the shaman. More about this rarely speak.14
There is also a cost in complex language itself, not only in one language as against another. Complex language let humans think abstract thoughts, create stories and invent belief systems, but it also meant they could believe things that were not true and lose their way. That is why animist peoples looked to the other-than-human Peoples, who stay true to their nature, and why the tribes needed shamans, to keep the good and true stories.15 See What did Sapir and Whorf actually claim about language and thought? and What is a metaphor, and how does it shape the way we see the world?
