Language has an enormous
influence on our perception of reality. Not only does it affect how and what we
think about, but also how we perceive things in the first place. Rather than serving
merely as a passive vehicle for containing our thoughts, language has an active
influence on the shape of our thoughts. “...language produces an organization
of experience... language first of all is a classification and arrangement of
the stream of sensory experience that results in a certain world order...” [Whorf].
Whorf quoting Edward Sapir:
“Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world
of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of
the particular language that has become the medium of expression for their
society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality without
the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving
specific problems of communication or reflection. 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 see and hear and otherwise experience very
largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose
certain choices of interpretation.” “Hopi has one noun that covers every thing
or being that flies, with the exception of
birds, which class is denoted by another noun.... The Hopi actually call
insect, airplane, and aviator all by the same word, and feel no difficulty
about it.... This class seems to us too large and inclusive, but so would our class
‘snow’ to an Eskimo. We have the same word for falling snow, snow on the
ground, snow packed hard like ice, slushy snow, wind-driven flying snow ?
whatever the situation may be. To an Eskimo, this all-inclusive word would be
almost unthinkable; he would say that falling snow, slushy snow, and so on, are
sensuously and operationally different, different things to contend with; he
uses different words for them and for other kinds of snow. The Aztecs go even
farther than we in the opposite direction, with ‘cold’, ‘ice’, and ‘snow’ all
represented by the same basic word with different terminations; ‘ice’ is the noun
form; ‘cold’, the adjectival form; and for ‘snow’, ‘ice mist’.” We are more ready to perceive
things as entities when our language happens to have nouns for them. For what
reason does our language happen to have the noun “schedule” for the connection
between, say, a train and a time, but no such familiar noun for the connection
between a person and his salary? The way we bundle relationships
is similarly affected. If we think of the relationships “has color” and “has
weight”, we might be inclined to lump them into a single “has” relationship,
with several kinds of entities in the second domain. But if we happen to employ
the word “weighs”, then that makes it easier to think of the second
relationship as being distinct in its own right. By what accident of linguistic
evolution do we fail to have a similar verb for the color phenomenon?
(“Appears” might be a close approximation.) Other examples: “has salary” vs.
“earns”, “has height” vs. what? The accidents of vocabulary: we are most
prepared to identify as entities or relationships those things for which our vocabulary
happens to contain a word. The presence of such a word focuses our thinking
onto what then appears as a singular phenomenon. The absence of such a word
renders the thought diffuse, non-specific, non-singular.
