When language hinders thought By Wan A.Hulaimi

http://www.nst.com.my/opinion/columnist/when-language-hinders-thought-1.48718#ixzz1mnepwQ9e

Sunday, February 19, 2012, 15:30 PM

Absurdity of some arguments on language

LANGUAGE is capable of turning up the heat, even among the mildest in the crowd. I get emails from Chong, Ramasamy and sometimes Daud bemoaning the loss, not of money, but understanding. We are instructed in this subject in Malay and I feel sorry for the students because they will have difficulty understanding certain concepts. The thinking here seems to be that some languages are superior to others and that only in certain languages can certain thoughts be expressed.
This is akin to the French saying that the only language for diplomacy is theirs.

I do agree that certain languages have better sonority over others, and therefore may be better suited for purpose. Make love in Spanish, court in French and swear in German. You may be saying the same thing, but certain things sound better in certain tongues. Coming from Terengganu (or Trengganu as I prefer to spell it) I can understand this very well.
People often come to me after reading my books to conjure up a phrase they think is Trengganuspeak but which in actuality is a mixture of Trengganu and Kelantan dialect. "Oh what's the difference?" they'll ask. And I think I am well qualified to answer this as my grandparents came from Besut, a once quiet backwater of Trengganu with pitch dark nights (as I remember it) where they speak a dialect that is more akin to Kelantanese than Trengganese.

My parents were Kuala Terengganu born and bred of course, so I speak the hard edged Trengganu-speak where both the road and the women who loiter thereabouts with sinful intent are encapsulated in jalang, the road to sin in just one word.

Well, what's the difference then between Trengganu and Kelantanspeak? Kelantanspeak is the language of romance, I tell them, its lilt is mellifluous, its mannerism gentle and its sense of irony is seldom found in this peninsula of ours. Trengganuspeak is gruff, suited for harsh storytelling of folks who move mountains and jump hurdles and stuff. It is the language that you'd want to swear in and would choose to use on a stranger who runs away with your sarong as you swim naked in the brook.

Those two dialects are capable of expressing the same thought of course, but one is heavy metal and the other is a better medium for describing the moonlight.

But is language a hindrance to thought? Or, as men in academic hats sometimes ask, are certain languages obstructions to thought? I came across that in my brief career in an academic institution, when large chunks of legal text were translated into Malay and the question naturally arose about specific definitions of words, for the legal term 'negligence' for instance, which carries a different meaning from just a translation of that word into another language. I was no legal expert even when I tried to be one, but I had read about Alice, and I answered them by quoting Humpty Dumpty from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass: 'When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'

The notion that language imprisons your thought is an old one and nothing could be further from the truth. Yet today people persist in saying that your thoughts are constrained by the language that you speak.

This falsehood was taken to greater heights in a story that I have read in many places, sometimes it is related to the travels of Captain Cook, sometimes to the travels of Magellan in South America. It is about the natives of a particular place -- Australia or South America -- who could not see the big ships of the European interlopers because boats of such magnitude did not exist in their heads. If this were true then people from deep forests would walk in towns blind as bats.

In linguistics that blame could be laid squarely at the doorstep of Benjamin Lee Whorf who presumed that your mother tongue controls you thoughts.
This may be true up to a point but he took it even further, to the ability to understand concepts, to the understanding of time, and so on. Papuans in deepest forests do not understand clockwork because they have not seen one, but show it to them and they will know.

One language may not have a word for 'abstract' but they can invent a word for that, 'abstrak' or 'spfllxtk' that will encompass what abstract means in English or German. The linguistics expert Guy Deutscher asks this question: the average English speaker will not know the English word 'factivity' but does this preclude him from understanding the distinction between factive and non-factive verbs?

Go back now to my example of the natives and the big ships. Will they be blind to this phenomenon just because they have not been aware of a construction of the magnitude of Drake's Golden Hind or have no word for it?

I am not making an argument in favour of one language or another but simply pointing out the absurdity of some of the arguments abroad.

101 LURIMAS

Monday, February 20, 2012