Cultures can differ markedly in how they invite
people to perceive the world around them and
these differences are encoded and reflected
in the fabric of their language, as observed
by the renowned linguist and anthropologist
Edward Sapir.
Let's put ourselves in a scenario where we
can contrast English with the language of
the Yurok people whose homeland Professor
Sapir was intimately acquainted with, as it
is on the Klamath River in Northern California
in an area where he did some of his fieldwork
with the Yurok culture and others.
And let's look at how speakers of English
think about and describe the locations of
objects and compare this with how speakers
of Yurok do.
As English speakers, if we put ourselves in
the shoes of the girl in this scenario and
someone asks us ‘‘Where is the cat?’’
What will we say?
Almost certainly, something like ‘‘The
cat is behind the clay pot.’’
This is because for purposes of describing
locations, English invites us to perceive
inanimate objects as if they’re people,
or at least animate beings of some kind, and
because of this when we’re looking at the
clay pot, we implicitly think of it as having
a front or side with a face and a back or
hind side and as having its side with a face
toward us.
As a result, we conceive of the cat as being
on the back side of or behind the clay pot.
And we do this even though we know, of course,
that clay pots are not beings and have neither
faces nor hind sides.
Now if we remain in the shoes of the girl
but change where she is in the scenario and
someone asks us “Where is the cat?”
What we'll say now is that the cat is in front
of the clay pot.
But, why does our conception of things, as
reflected in what we say, change even though
the location of the cat with respect to the
clay pot has not changed at all?
Because we conceive of objects that we want
to locate things in terms of as being like
people facing us, what counts as the front
of the clay pot has changed completely.
It’s no longer experienced as the same side
that we saw before.
It’s now the opposite side.The cat is now
between us and this side of the clay pot,
so we think of it as being in front of it.
The situation is quite different for speakers
of Yurok.
If they put themselves in the shoes of the
girl in this scenario, and someone asks them
“Where is the cat?”, they will say what
in English would translate literally as “The
cat is UPSTREAM FROM the clay pot.”
The culture of the Yurok people is one in
which life revolves around the Klamath River
and its location and flow relative to other
locations in the landscape are important and
highly salient in their everyday lives.
As such, their sense of where things are in
space is keyed to the westward flow of the
river from the mountains to the ocean.
Since the cat is positioned to the east of
the clay pot, the Yurok speaker conceives
of it as being upstream from the clay pot.
Now consider what a speaker of Yurok in the
shoes of this girl would say when she is in
this other place in the scenario and is asked
“Where is the cat?”
Just as in the previous scenario, they would
say “The cat is upstream from the clay pot.”
This is because the locations of the cat and
the clay pot have not changed and it does
not matter where the speaker is located or
what the front and hind sides of the faceless
clay pot might be if it were a person.
All that is needed and all that matters for
speakers of Yurok are the locations of things
understood in terms of the cardinal directions
that the river's orientation and flow index.
Since the cat is still further east of the
clay pot, it can only be said to be upstream
from it.
English and Yurok have fundamentally different
systems for talking about how things are located
in space.
For a speaker of English, the locations of
objects are described not in terms of some
fixed location but in terms of where they
are relative to another point of reference.
Since this other point of reference is the
speaker themself, the locations of objects
are described relative to where the speaker
is.
Of course, the locations of speakers change
all the time, so the way they describe where
things are will change as well.
For this reason, when they're looking at the
cat relative to the clay pot from one direction,
they might say something like ‘‘The cat
is behind the clay pot”, but when looking
at it from another direction, they'll say,
depending on what that direction is, ‘‘The
cat is in front of the clay pot” or ‘‘next
to the clay pot” or ‘‘on the right or
left side of the clay pot,” with right-ness
and left-ness being projected onto the scene
based on the positions of their hands on their
own bodies.
Yurok works in a completely different way.
The locations of objects in space are described
in relation to a fixed point of reference,
such as the cardinal directions that are indexed
by the unchanging flow of the river.
Thus, ‘downstream from’ means essentially
‘to the west of’, ‘upstream’ means
‘to the east of’ and other expressions
that make reference to culturally salient
landmarks to the north and south, for example,
yield other location concepts that are also
understood independently of the location of
the speaker.
Since the way speakers of Yurok and English
talk about spatial locations is so different,
we may ask if they think about the world and
see it in anything like the same way.
Is my BEHIND or ON THE RIGHT OF the same as
your DOWNSTREAM FROM or UPSTREAM FROM just
because they might both be used to convey
equivalent information concerning where the
same cat is relative to the same clay pot,
and even though I must project front and hind
sides on the clay pot and you must bring to
mind the flow of the river even in a scene
with no river running through it.
This is a question that is addressed by the
principle of LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY, according
to which the language that we speak significantly
influences how we think about and view the
world.
In one experiment testing this idea, researchers
designed a perception task for speakers of
English and of Tzeltal, a language that, like
Yurok, uses a fixed point of reference for
spatial locations.
In this task, participants were asked to look
at an arrow and remember the direction it
pointed.
They were then rotated 180 degrees and asked
to identify which of two arrows they saw,
A or B. Given what you know about how English
and Tzeltal speakers are implicitly invited
to conceive of space based on the structure
and meaning of the expressions they use to
talk about it, that is, with fixed versus
relative points of reference, which of these
two arrows do you suppose a Tzeltal speaker
would identify, and which would an English
speaker.
As you may have guessed, Tzeltal speakers
most often identified arrow A as the arrow
they had seen, while English speakers identified
arrow B. Why does it work this way?
Well, the Tzeltal language only has expressions
for identifying the locations of objects in
terms of fixed points of reference.
When they see the original arrow, they see
it as pointing from west to east.
When they are rotated, they look for the arrow
that is still pointing from west to east,
which is arrow A. By contrast, when an English
speaker sees the original arrow, they remember
it as pointing from left to right.
When rotated, they look for the arrow that
they perceive as pointing in the same direction
that is indexed by the right side of their
own body, which is arrow B. The researchers
conducting this experiment concluded that
the different behavior of the Tzeltal and
English speakers on this task was explained
by the different ways their respective languages
encode spatial orientation.
In other words, their perception of how things
are located in the world was influenced by
the language they happen to speak, just like
the principle of linguistic relativity suggests.
