The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language

We are told that what languages teach us about being human is how different we are. Actually, languages’ lesson for us is more truly progressive—that our differences are variations on being the same.

Spanish has separate words for a corner depending on whether it’s outside (you go around the esquina) or inside (you stand in the rincón).

There do exist languages in which the feminine, rather than the masculine, is the default. In them, more words are feminine than masculine, a new word created or brought into the language is spontaneously marked feminine, and/or when there are males and females present, it’s the feminine pronoun that is used. For one, they are the exceptions that prove the rule, very rare—as it happens, the Amazonian Jarawara we keep hearing about in this book, and sister societies to theirs, are examples.

Second, however, we search in vain for evidence that these societies cherish women in an instructive way. Rather, the treatment of women in such societies seems almost counterintuitively incommensurate with a grammar that gives preference to the feminine gender. Among one of these groups, the Banawá, when a girl menstruates for the first time she is confined to a hut for months, only allowed out for excretion and bathing, in which case a basket is woven tightly around her head without even eye slits; when she is released, after an extended celebration she is beaten on the back until bloody.

Most certainly in this case, language is not creating a worldview in any way we would recognize. Popular Whorfianism would rather not dwell on such a thing—which could shed light on the broader Whorfian approach to other things a language supposedly makes its speakers meaningfully sensitized to.

In Mandarin Chinese, In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth is Qĭ chū shén chuàng zào tiān dì. Those words mean simply “start start God achieve make sky earth.”

There are no endings of any kind. There is no marking of the past, no definite articles, and no plural marking. There is no marking of anything as an object, much less marking the “beginning” as located “at” a place. The Chinese speaker neither reminds their interlocutor that what they are saying is “actual” nor even has to link the words for the sky and the earth with a word for and! Start start God achieve make sky earth.

This is Chinese. For a Westerner, much of mastering the language is a matter of getting used to how very much does not have to be said.