“At least so far as thought is dependent on words. ”  – by Orwell

Is thought dependent on words? Do people think in their language, English, Chinese, or French? In much of our daily life, people simply assume that words determine minds. As mind and language are two important functions which produced by our brain, there should be some relationship between language and mind. To this issue, many linguists have done a series of research and experiments to prove their points. As a matter of fact, it is a very complicated argument in linguistic area. Thus, in this essay, I will discuss both opinions which agree that words determine thoughts and those who don’t.

Firstly, what is mind? It is your way of thinking or the thoughts that you have. So, in a certain degree, thinking and thoughts can be described as mind. And what is language? Some scientists believe that it is one of the bases that distinguish human to animals. Although animals may communicate with each other by some signals or symbols, it cannot describe as language. Also people can communicate with gestures or other body languages too.

Then, let’s talk about their relationship. The following points are showing that thought is dependent on our language.

In some philosophers’ point of view, animals don’t have language, so they must lack of consciousness. For instance, a rabbit may not have the thought “perhaps it will rain tomorrow”. And in political world, governments always use euphemism such as pacification (bombing), revenue enhancement (taxes) as a form of mind control. People will get confused by the words that governments use.

Another argument brought up by Sapir-Whorf which makes me interested in is that people will think differently because of their different languages. Taking myself for example, I speak both Mandarin and English. When I use English, I have to pay attention to the tense, for what time is the event happened and also the moment of speaking. The same thing will not happen in using Chinese because it doesn’t involve changes in grammar when talking about past or future. But when I have to say a noun, I need to think about a word before the noun to fit for the type. Such as “a” in “a (zhi) pen” means differently in “a” in “a (pi) horse”. Because of these differences in using languages, we may develop a different view of seeing this world. So  I guess  languages must have done something on developing a country’s culture. But it is only my own opinion which has no scientific evidence. I will show some more research by Sapir-Whorf in the following.

At the first sight, the above words do make sense. To some extent, languages may have some influence  in people’s mind. But think it further, many of the examples showed above is absurdity. Although a rabbit cannot talk, you can’t make a conclusion that it has no consciousness. You don’t know whether the rabbit is thinking or not. As for government euphemism, Steven Pinker says “it is contemptible not because it is a form of mind control but because it is a form of lying.”.  People will understand the deception if the word “revenue enhancement” is clear enough for “taxes”.

In fact, we all have the experience that when we reading or listening, we usually remember the main point but not the exact words. Furthermore, if thoughts depended on words, there would no new words ever be coined.  So till now we see that those evidence are not strong enough to prove that languages determine their speakers’ way of thinking. And now I will show an experiment mentioned in Pinker’s book about differences among languages cause differences in the thoughts of their speakers.

It is about a comparison between a kind of Native American language Apache and English. It is similar to what I have mentioned. People use different grammars in those two languages.  And Whorf noticed that because of their language, workers were led to misconstrue dangerous situations.   For example, a worker tossed a cigarette into an “empty” drum which actually was full of gasoline vapour and caused an explosion. In Apache, it is a dripping spring is expressed “As water, or springs, whiteness moves downward.” In that way, it is easily making mistakes and obviously not our way of thinking.

In this story, Whorf made some connection between this action and their language. But think it twice, it does not make any sense. Firstly, the cause of this accident is that the worker did not notice the gasoline in the drum, and the gasoline is invisible. So the real reason is because of his eyes but not the language. Secondly, it is mentioned in Pinker’s book that the psycholinguists Eric Lenneberg and Roger Brown pointed that Whorf did not study any Apaches, his assertions are based totally on Apache grammar. And he translated the sentences by word-for-word. It is too stilted for people to talk. Actually, Apaches speak differently. And even so, we can’t say they think differently, because we don’t know what they are thinking about.

Another evidence strongly showing that mind does not depend on languages is about the babies. A lot of people think that the infants do not have the ability to talk, when you talking to them, they have no reaction, so the babies must have no thought or mind. The truth is the opposite. A developmental psychologist called Karen Wynn has recently claimed that five-month-old babies can do a simple form of mental arithmetic. To prove that, she did an interesting experiment to examine infants’ reaction on the changing objects. And that also showed that infants as young s five days old are sensitive to number.

Normally, the baby will get bored if watch the same objects for a long time; but if change the scene, the baby will regain interest for a while. So, in Wynn’s experiment, the babies firstly will see one rubber Mickey Mouse doll, after a while, they got bored and look away. Then a screen came up, and a prancing visible hand reached out from behind a curtain putting a second Mickey Mouse behind the screen. When the screen removes, if there were two Mickey, the babies looked for a short moment. But if there was only one doll, even though the doll was the original one, the babies were attracted. Wynn also tested a second group of infants. This time, there were two dolls on the screen, then a hand visibly reached behind the screen and remove one of them. The result is that if the screen came up to display one Mickey, the babies had no interest reaction, if it showed two dolls, the babies had more trouble tearing themselves away. From this experiment, we see that the babies must paying attention to how many dolls were behind the screen, updating their counts as the screen changes. If the number is not what they expected, they would examine the screen carefully, thinking if there was something wrong using their brain.                                                                                                                                            These experiments indicate the babies have thought too. And it is natural, if babies could not think , how can they learn language? And, to those people who are not able to speak, they still have their way to communicate, to think. So, from those experiments and research, I am convinced that mind is not determined by language.  But as I mentioned before, there are some important relationships between them. More evidences should be researched by linguists and scientists. What we have done is not enough, more effort is needed in order to explore more marvellous phenomenon on this field.

Reference: Steven Pinker, Harperperennial 1994. The language instinct, how the mind creates language.