language and the world

How does our language shape our thoughts and feelings? If a language had a thousand words for despair would it tend towards being a more melancholic society? The old debate about language and the world came up again the Guardian this morning.

There was an article about an ex-missionary called Daniel Everett who had claimed that the language of an Amazonian tribe called the Pirahã had no recursion, ie the ability to include a an extra clause within a sentence. An example of recursion is extending the sentence "Daniel Everett talked about the story of his life" to read, "Daniel Everett flew to London and talked about the story of his life".

The point being that recursion was seen by most linguists as being part of an innate and universal grammatical framework ( a theory developed by Noam Chomsky) that we have hardwired into our brain. Obviously if the Pirahã did not have it then the theory is flawed as it would not be innate in humans. Either Daniel was right and Chomsky was wrong about innate grammatical structures in the brain or Daniel had just missed the use of recursion in the Pirahã language went the debate.

The article didn't suggest that either Daniel or his critics had considered the possibility that recursion may have been possible in Pirahã but that for other reasons it was not used in the language. Though to be fair I am not sure if it is possible to have a linguistic structure could be found in the brain but not used in the language.

But there were some other interesting aspects highlighted. Apparently the Pirahã have no socially lubricating "hello" and "thank you" and "sorry". They have no words for colours, no words for numbers and no way of expressing any history beyond that experienced in their lifetimes.

One can only wonder what this does for the ability to describe and feel emotionally. how much of emotion is contigent on the ability to express it. Could the Pirahã ever have the blues?

It reminds me of the Benjamin Whorf hypothesis that our view of the world is related to the language we use and our range of expression, both emotional and intellectual. Whorf suggested that the Hopi Indians of the southwest USA had no tense referring to time in their language (in the way we have past and future tenses) and that this must profoundly affect their relationship to the notion of time and therefore to the universe.

as the writer, Jeannette Winterson put it:
"The Hopi, an Indian tribe, have a language as sophisticated as ours, but no tenses for past, present and future. The division does not exist. What does this say about time?"

If one sees the past and future as part of a timeless continuity rather than seperated by the junctions of past/present/future then amongst other things perhaps one might act with more respect towards the environment as one's relationship to one's unborn descendants would be closer if they were seen in the same time frame and not some distant and less connected unrealised future.

Sadly though, Whorf's otherwise fascinating idea was based on some dodgy research - he had made his claims based on conversations with one Hopi speaker miles away from his homelands. Those conversations didn't cover how the Hopi do in fact use time distinctions and what linguistic forms they have to express such ideas.

But the seed of an interesting idea remains - how does one's language affect one's ability to feel. we casually talk of having indescribable emotions but this is often a linguistic cop out. what if it were true though - without a word for love we could not love as deeply as we do?

Do we need new words for different loves to comminicate our feelings more clearly? perhaps a return to eros, philia, and agape?