All human beings live in the same world and have similar experiences. Therefore, all languages spoken on the planet have the same basic categories for expressing ideas and referring to objects, reflecting this common human experience.
This notion has been defended by various linguists for years, but for the American Caleb Everettif we analyze languages more closely we will see that many basic concepts are not universal and that speakers of different languages They see and think about the world differently.
In his new book, A Myriad of Tongues: How Languages Reveal Differences in How We Think (“A Myriad of Languages: How Languages Reveal Differences in How We Think”), based on the many languages he researched in the Brazilian Amazon, Everett shows that many cultures do not think the same way about the world. time, space or numbers.
Perhaps few people are more capable of analyzing this problem than Everett. Born in the United States, he had an unusual childhood in the 1980s, dividing his time between his country of origin, the public schools of São Paulo and Porto Velho, and the indigenous villages in the interior of the Amazon, in Rondônia.
Son of the American Daniel Everett, who arrived in Brazil in the 1970s as a Christian missionary, Caleb a accompanied his parents on missions in the Brazilian Amazon and therefore came to live among the indigenous people, spending part of his childhood fishing and playing with them in the forest.
Returning to the United States, he graduated and began working in the financial market, but then he turned his life around: he left the financial world, embarked on a doctorate and returned to Rondônia, where he dedicated himself to researching Amazonian languages.
Daniel Gallas, BBC News Brazil journalistspoke with Caleb Everett about his experiences in the Brazilian Amazon and the debate around how languages shape the world we live in.
His book suggests that we are better understanding the more than 7,000 languages spoken around the world today. What are linguists learning from these lesser-known languages?
We are learning a lot. What is clear is that languages are much more different from each other than we thought. We used to assume that there was this diversity between languages, but that behind it there was some kind of universal component, something that all languages shared.
And what we are discovering, as we look at more and more languages, is that they are different in very profound ways that were not anticipated in some of the theoretical models of linguistics of the 1960s and 1970s.
Of course, there are some commonalities. We all have the same ears, the same mouth and the same brain. There are these similarities between languages, but it is not because there is something genetically programmed into the language.
Much of your work is based on Amazonian languages that you have studied for a long time. What specifically did you learn from them?
The Amazon is really fascinating, because although there are other regions of the world, such as New Guinea or West Africa, that have more languages, the languages of the Amazon are not related to each other.
There are a few hundred languages, but there are dozens of linguistic families, such as Tupi or Arawak or some other isolated languages that have no known “relatives.”
Some are completely different from each other and are barely 100 kilometers away from each other.
The Amazon is a kind of fascinating microcosm of the linguistic diversity that exists in the world. And we can learn a lot about the different ways humans communicate just by looking at people in the Amazon.
I think we are often guilty in the West of a kind of homogenization of these groups. In a way we put their languages and their cultures in the same container.
In the Amazon, what did you discover that supports this idea that people think differently because they speak differently?
One of the ways the languages of this region have contributed knowledge is how people think about time.
In English and many languages we tend, for example, to use metaphors in which the future is in front of us and the past behind us.
But there are some groups in the Amazon that don’t talk about weather that way.
There is a famous case in the Tupi Kawahib language, where time is not even talked about in terms of space.
While a language like English has three tenses, some languages have up to seven. They divide their time in very different ways.
So it’s not just superficial things like “they talk about plants and animals differently.”
And this is true to a certain extent. But what interests me most, and that is the focus of the book, are these fundamental aspects of human thought. How we think about quantities, how we think about space, how we think about time, and how humans develop these capacities, and how that seems to vary somewhat across cultures.
In your book, you give the example of an English phrase with many references to time: “Last Monday I ran for half an hour, like I do every week.” You said that some of the languages you study don’t have all the resources to structure time this way. Others have seven tenses. Are these languages less or more sophisticated than what we are used to?
You see languages that perhaps pay attention to time and shapes, in a way that we don’t.
If you only have past, present or future in your language, when one is speaking, simply indicate whether it was in one of these three tenses.
But if you have seven tenses that might include something like the very distant past or the very distant future, then you need to pay attention to these temporal aspects and perhaps more subtle ways.
What language was that in?
It is a language called Yagua [hablada en la Amazonía peruana]. Although there are many languages that have five or six tenses, there are some that have none.
One of the languages I worked on in the Amazon, Karitiana, has two tenses: future and non-future. This is a language spoken in the State of Rondônia.
This is a very common time system.
But let’s take the example you remember, about a 30-minute run I did yesterday or last week. Let’s think about this phrase. What is 30 minutes? Minutes is something very culturally and linguistically defined. The minute comes from a 60-based number system that dates back to Mesopotamia, which is why we divide our hour by 60 and then divide it again to get seconds.
These are very arbitrary cultural things that we learn and seem natural to us as we learn to count the hours.
But it’s really unnatural for a lot of people.
Imagine if you are talking to an Amazonian who has never encountered the concept of hours, minutes or weeks, which is also culturally constructed. There are so many very specific cultural traditions embedded in that phrase that impact the way we think.
Think about how much your day is dictated by looking at clocks and thinking about where you have to be at a certain time and in certain minutes. All this is arbitrary.
Many cultures dispense with these notions altogether. These things are encoded in the language that children learn from an early age, which shapes how we think about the passage of time. And this seems totally natural to us until you are faced with someone for whom these concepts are totally unnatural and you realize that “this is an intelligent human being and he does not need these concepts.”
That doesn’t mean they are useless. I think they are very useful, but they are useful in our cultural context. And they’re just a different way of thinking about the world. They are not “the” way of thinking about the world.
Take, for example, the language you mentioned that has seven tenses. What do you notice is different about the way they think or the way their society is?
I would say some of that is arbitrary.
But what some researchers have tried to do is an experimental test: Do these linguistic differences have an impact on the way people think about time in general, even when they’re not speaking?
And now there is a good amount of evidence that that happens.
As in the example of the future in front of you and the past behind you.
Nowadays, there is a lot of experimental evidence that even when people spoke these languages, the past was in front and the future was behind, there is a lot of evidence that people think about time differently, even when they don’t speak.
Basic experiments showed that when people talk about the future in some of these languages, they point backward, and when they talk about the past, they point forward, while English speakers do the opposite.
Because you can see the past. See what you had for breakfast. You know what happened yesterday. But the future is something unknown to us, so this kind of basic metaphor of vision and seeing the past, not seeing the future, is the basis of how people think about time. And some of these cultures and this way of thinking about time emerge even in non-linguistic contexts.
You had a very interesting and unusual childhood, as you spent much of your time with the indigenous people of Brazil. How was this experience?
I have good memories of my childhood and Brazil. I spent much of my childhood in the village of Pirahã with my two sisters and my parents.
But I also spent time in Brazilian public schools, going back and forth and occasionally visiting the United States.
My childhood was a mix of being in a village in the middle of the jungle, in Brazilian cities, and occasionally in American cities.
Memories of being in nature are generally very pleasant. Now I look back and think I would never do that to my son (laughs), when I think about the risks we took. We all got malaria. It’s easy to look back fondly when we all survived.
I have good memories of being in the village swimming in the river with my indigenous friends, of hunting or fishing with my sisters, but also some of the negative aspects, such as the exploitation of indigenous people by local traders.
You mentioned the Pirahã language and that has been a fairly famous debate in the linguistic world between your father and the famous American linguist Noam Chomsky. This intellectual debate became quite fierce in the exchange of words. Your work seems to be closely related to this central question in the world of linguistics. How do you see this controversial debate?
It is a very controversial debate. I like to think that, in some ways, science has moved beyond some of these debates and the field has become more empirical. My father was certainly one of the people who contributed to this. In recent decades, many researchers have provided data from different languages from Australia, the Amazon and Africa, which do not seem to fit the models that Chomsky and others promoted in the 1960s and 1970s. And these models became very influential.
In defense of these models, at first they seem to have worked quite well, but as more and more exceptions arise, things just don’t seem to add up. And you have to wonder what this model is for?
The model is largely based on English.
The new generation of researchers (my generation and the next) are not very satisfied with the models of the 60s and 70s. And that is not an insult.
This happens in many fields. Things evolve. And now I think we’ve moved beyond that in a way that is no longer the central debate in linguistics. This happens in many fields.
But it still stirs up a lot of strong emotions. Do you think the world of linguistics will end up leaving universal grammar behind?
The idea of universal grammar has changed a lot. If we go back and look at the studies from the ’60s and ’70s, some very important predictions were made. Now it is almost impossible to prove that the predictions are false.
They say: all humans have a language and that is why there must be a universal grammar. It is something so vague that one cannot disagree, but in my opinion it is no longer useful for making predictions.
But I say this also because the researchers I really respect now, who are maybe 10 years younger than me and who do cutting-edge research, don’t seem to be taking this debate into account in their work.
Instead, they focus on doing really good experiments, using big data, data science, and computer programming, which have become fundamental to the work we do.
And this is not only true in linguistic research.
When people invest decades of their lives in a specific theoretical model in any discipline, they tend to be quite biased people.
We like to think we are objective, but we really aren’t. After you’ve invested decades in a certain vision and promoted it, it takes a really great person to say, “You know, I was wrong for the last 30 years and I need to admit it in the face of so much.” evidence”.
Recent technology has accelerated the study of languages. But many of these languages are also dying quickly. Is there a race against time to study them before they die?
Yes. I think there is a lot of linguistic documentation around the world and sometimes I think we are a bit selfish as researchers, we want to get all this data before it disappears or we want people to continue speaking their languages.
In the Amazon, for example, you see that there are some indigenous groups that really care a lot about maintaining their language and some of them don’t seem to care that much. And who are we to tell them that it should matter?
Sometimes I think that’s important to me because I have a selfish interest in wanting more languages and it’s fascinating for me and my career to look at that data.
But yes, unfortunately for some languages are dying.
They die mainly for economic reasons. When some groups of people in Brazil and elsewhere want their children to be economically viable in the face of dwindling reserves and the increasing difficulty of surviving from hunting and fishing, these people have to speak Portuguese, Spanish or English.
Depending on the context in which they are found, economic pressures are so strong on some of these individual groups that most models suggest that many of these languages will disappear within the next 100 years.
Throughout your life have you seen Amazonian languages dying or about to die?
An example that comes to mind is the Suruí language, which is also spoken in Rondônia and there are still speakers. The missionary who was one of the first to contact them in the 60s said it was a linguistically vibrant language, but now many of these people speak mainly Portuguese.
And if we look at the proportion of children who learn the language as their first language, we see that it is decreasing. This is usually the best indicator of whether a language will survive or not.
For many of these languages, there simply aren’t many children who learn them.
There are other languages that we have seen disappear completely.
One that comes to mind is a language called Orouim, which was spoken on Brazil’s border with Bolivia.
But there are many examples of languages that ended up disappearing. Or languages where there are still many speakers, but the proportion of Portuguese speakers has increased greatly among children.
And with the death of languages, is humanity losing diversity in the way it thinks about the world?
One of the things we discovered that is mentioned in the book is that there are several groups that have shown to have a rich vocabulary about odors.
That’s another thing we used to think: “humans don’t have abstract words for smells.”
But it turns out that in the last 10 years several languages have been documented that have rich, abstract words for smells.
As these languages disappear and some of them are on the brink of extinction, we are losing something critical about how humans think about smells and how they can talk about smells. If we lose that, we lose part of how humans think about the odors they smell.
As languages die, we lose something basic in our understanding of how humans think about the sensations they feel
You compare widely spoken languages with little-known languages to illustrate how people can think differently. But does that difference exist even between widely spoken languages? For example, does a Chinese think about the world differently than a German because of their language?
It is always difficult to know how much is culture and how much is language. But in the Chinese case, for example, there has been some fascinating research showing that Mandarin speakers seem to think about time differently than English speakers, because the metaphors they use to refer to time are a little different.
The Chinese use vertical metaphors, where time falls, as opposed to the horizontal metaphor of the future in front of you, like in English.
Another example among Chinese speakers is quantitative cognition: how people think about quantities.
English speakers, for example, tend to be a little slower than Chinese speakers at learning numbers, due to numbers like 11 (“eleven”) and 12 (“twelve”).
In English, in the tens from 13 onwards, there is a predictable pattern: “thirteen” (13) and “fourteen” (14) are the combination of the numbers three and four with the ten (“teen”). But this does not happen with the words “eleven” (11) and “twelve” (12).
In languages like Chinese this is more transparent. In the tens part you learn the combination “one-ten”, two-ten”, etc.
This would help explain why Chinese children do better on some addition tasks than English-speaking children.
An example that is often given in linguistics is that the Eskimos have more than 50 words to refer to snow, since it is something important in their culture. But is this a wrong example?
This has become a funny thing for linguists to make fun of.
It got to the point where the New York Times published an article saying that Eskimos have hundreds of words for snow and that is simply not true.
However, the central idea behind this lie is not inaccurate: people live in very different environments. It’s no surprise that some Amazonian groups have no words to describe snow.
There is now some evidence that some of these terms that exist in the environment can have an impact on the way people think about some of these external things.
You mention that WEIRD societies (acronym for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic Societies) are not a good population to generalize the capabilities of humanity. Because?
It was psychology researchers about 15 years ago who invented this WEIRD acronym.
And I think that’s a really smart way to do it. Nowadays people are aware that, if there are around 7,000 different languages and cultures in the world, it is problematic for us to stop again and again at what the Americans, the British or even the Japanese think, and generalize that this is the case. how humans think.
We (from WEIRD countries) are a small sample of human diversity. And furthermore, we are not representative.
One reason is that studies show that literacy, for example, changes the makeup of the brain.
As people learn to read and write, they focus on two-dimensional images. Kids do this over and over again with books and screens and it has some cognitive effects.
But from the perspective of human history, if we think about longer time scales, humans left Africa about 100,000 years ago, in different waves.
They walked around the world and reached many places, including southern South America, 20,000 years ago. During that time, we developed very different ways of thinking.
On the European side, agriculture is only about 8,000 years old and industrialization is only about 100 years old. And widespread literacy (where everyone is expected to read and write) is a recent phenomenon.
When we use people from WEIRD countries to generalize how humans think, we are only looking at a specific branch of humans that developed in a certain part of the world for only a few thousand years of this entire 100 thousand year history.
It’s a very small part of the story from a historical perspective.
Obviously, it’s incredibly influential today because these groups became colonizing powers and changed the way the world works.
But from a historical and anthropological perspective, this is only part of the picture. And sometimes it is a non-representative part.
We need to look for a less biased sample of how humans talk and think.
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