A New Philology

Reflections on "Linguistic Relativity"

You’ve probably heard it said before that language influences the way that we think. It’s a very widespread notion that, since we exist and think in language, this colours how we perceive the world. If you are familiar with linguistics, however, you probably know how controversial this actually is. 

What was a kind of cringe Quora-tier mindblow: “language affects the way you think… man” has in recent years become widely discussed in the pop-linguistics circles of YouTube. The Linguistic Relativity hypothesis and its refutations have been done to death in print and video format, so I will not go over them again in depth, but instead hope to give a different perspective in this essay that refers instead to philosophy. I would argue that the strictly scientific approach taken to this question by linguists can only take us so far - it is without doubt necessary to gather a specific type of understanding, but discussions of this subject often reach a vague and inconclusive impasse. 

The “soft version” of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity is now more or less accepted by linguists, but where does that actually leave us? “Language sort of forms the way we think a bit, maybe.” We tend in modernity to understand things “quantitatively”, rather than qualitatively in the terms of French philosopher Jacques Ellul.¹ A modern mind finds it hard to conceive of real and tangible “difference” that doesn’t create quantifiable results that can be measured. Is there room in linguistics for discussion of the qualitative? A scientific mind, or discipline for that matter, will be untrusting of something that cannot give it hard numbers, but are we, then, to leave all discussion of the “richness” of language to flippant ill-informed chatter?

Any time languages are spoken about in daily life, opinions about their aesthetic quality are ten-a-penny. People after all still live for ineffable things like this, whether they know it or not. This signals to me that both ends of this linguistic dispute are approaching it from a mistaken angle - trying to assess the true difference made by one’s native language through terms that mute language itself, which is so concerned with the qualitative. What could be more human than language; what could require more delicacy in understanding it? It is my view that we cannot hope to approach the question of language through exclusive reference to a scientific-linguistic method that collapses perhaps the biggest and most human phenomenon in life into a sort of plainly physical object. I will not pretend to have conclusions about this topic, but instead we will here look for a path towards a fuller appreciation and approach towards this most human of things; towards a new philology; a rediscovery of the love of words.

The Bastard Tongue

Linguistic relativity is an elegant idea and seems very intuitively plausible. Many people outside of linguistics, especially in philosophy; ever more concerned with language, have made use of it for their own ends. I remember a minor eureka-moment when I learned that English, the birth-language of “analytic philosophy” was also categorised as an “analytical language”. Of course, these two things have very little to do with one another, but I had always been struck at how different the tenor and direction of thinking was between the thought of the Anglo-Saxon world and that of “continental” philosophy, and how this seemed to align with my perceptions of the different traits of English and the Romance and continental Germanic languages. German with its case system and the lengthy conjugations of Italian and French always felt, for lack of a better word, more language-y to me. On top of this it felt to me as though people who thought from birth in these less isolating, more “grounded” languages might be more able to think in certain ways that we native Anglophones are less given to.

“They are not a philosophical race: the English”,² said Nietzsche, and I am inclined to agree. I do not think that we as a people have the mental stomach for the kind of thinking-in-thinking that once went on in Germany, or Ancient Greece for that matter. I think English people are quick to roll their eyes at overly dense philosophising and are definitely more inclined to believe things with an empirical basis. I must say that I’ve never found myself very drawn towards English philosophy,³ as much as it is worth reading as a part of the overall canon; especially for understanding the ideas that formed today’s world. 

While this essay is very speculative, I do not think the importance of this question should be overlooked. As the English language permeates the globe more and more, what influence it may have on the minds it colonises and the type of thought that it may or may not encourage should concern anyone. Particularly critics of globalisation or industrial modernity, both of which can be said to be in large part projects undertaken through the medium of the English language, ought to want to interrogate this further. As someone who has contributed to this process, having (briefly) taught English abroad, I saw how whether people could or could not speak in English was an indicator of a number of social attributes. The associations that the language has in Spain or Italy are very similar - if you speak it then you are likely younger, more educated, wealthier and more connected to the globalised world. If you do not then the opposite is likely true. These associations help to form the foreign perception of English as a language of commerce, the “(...) necessary sin; the perfect language to sell pigs in” as Irish poet Michael Hartlett saw it, but is it purely incidental that English came to represent this? Is there anything to the notion that essential characteristics of our language are themselves at play here? Is the “English mechanical stultification of the world”⁴ and its attendant philosophy, a result of the language it came from?

Tedesco Andato Male

According to one Italian philosopher, Umberto Galimberti, English is not even a language, but rather “tedesco andato male”; “German gone-bad”, (or “gone-off”, even).⁵ Galimberti claims that the English language has no capacity for abstraction whatsoever, even going so far to say that English people have none either, “gli inglesi non hanno l'astrazione”. He justifies this by saying that we have no equivalent to the Italian “si dice”, “it is said”, which uses an “impersonal pronoun”, something English lacks. He says the translation of this in English is “you say”, evidence that we, through the strictures of our language, are forced to make things concrete and take things out of abstract space - saying “you” rather than “si”, which does not refer to a person, but is an abstract linguistic form. He then says that the Italian word qualcuno can only be said in English as somebody, again imposing a physicality on the phrase. 

Of course, this is rampant nonsense, only making clear his ignorance of the English language. “It is said” is equally impersonal and abstract as si dice and “somebody” can just as easily be said “someone” (lexically identical to qualcuno). Not only this, if someone said: 

“in English you say “subscribe to my Substack””, 

Who actually is the “you” here? It isn’t referring to anyone in particular, it’s just as abstract as “si dice”.

This linguistic difference, he claims, accounts for the thinking of analytic philosophy. He echoes Nietzsche’s opinion, more or less, but marking language out as the origin of English error.

Just because we do not make use of an impersonal pronoun, doesn’t mean that we can’t think abstractly, and come to think of it, how on earth could this actually be true? I shouldn’t be too unfair on Galimberti - he isn’t a native speaker of English and could be forgiven for his mistakes, for that matter he is also not a linguist. 

While Galimberti was talking from a place of ignorance, I must admit that I’ve often found myself led towards similar conclusions about English specifically. As I spoke about earlier - this language with a very stripped-down, word-order based grammar, with such a heavy dosage of loanwords from Romance languages (as Galimberti notes) that a sense of linguistic rootedness and particularity seems hard to find, seems like a bastardised fall from grace. Perhaps the cosmopolitan nature of our language is not just an accident of empire, but instead thanks to the traits of the language itself as a kind of Old English-Norman pidgin - you could argue that English, with its relatively simple grammar and lesser barriers to entry than other languages, was destined to become the global lingua Franca. I’ve often felt like my language lacks the sense of placement that German or Italian or most languages have. There’s a reason that English nationalists are so keen to cleave back to Old English, as I spoke about in my essay on Vanity Fair. There is a sense in which this fusional, more “high-grammatical” language feels less entropic. But what is the actual location of this feeling if it isn’t something that can consistently yield scientific results?

The problem is not with the idea that languages are different or even formative, it’s with the efforts to demonstrate this in too quantitative a manner. Galimberti’s claims are bound to be discredited (not only because he is ignorant of the language), because in a universe where men need to be able to discuss many things a language cannot survive if it can’t speak in abstract terms, or if it can’t complete any technical task that is required of it. This kind of subtler difference, in my view, cannot be interpreted through the sciences, but instead we must turn to the humanities and to philosophy. Fittingly, the problem of English cannot be solved in a typically English way.

Φίλος Λόγος, Philos Logos

The scientific-linguistic consensus has it that any concept or meaning that can be communicated in any human language can be equally communicated in any other language; obviously differing in the words used and the way it’s formulated. This would overturn Galimberti’s claims altogether as well as just about any notion that language conditions thought. Indeed, I’ve found time and again that it is truly difficult to demonstrate the kind of felt distinction between languages with the tools of modern linguistics. 

The orthodoxy would have it that all human languages are essentially equivalent, just with arbitrary and inconsequential differences in the sequences of phonemes that they use to say the same thing. This leads pop-linguistic types to sneeringly deride “linguistic prescriptivism”, the holding up of a “correct” standard form of language, typically in terms of grammar. Your Secondary School English teacher telling you off for saying “less” instead of “fewer”. If all language is essentially equivalent, no one way of saying something is any “better” than any other. So long as the listener understands the speaker, we’re told, who cares how it is said?

This conclusion is utterly unsatisfying, not just for me, but it ought to be for those making it also. First of all, who among us talking-creatures actually feels this to be true? Linguists, even more than the rest of us, are undoubtedly lovers of the richness of language and they themselves will lament the disappearance of endangered languages, or their suppression in favour of a national standard language. But, if all language is the same and there’s no legitimacy to “prescriptivism”, then why does it matter? When all is just an arbitrary group level aesthetic choice, what difference does it make? This is the forgetting of philology in its truer sense as the love of words.

There is an intangible beauty to language that the modern linguists’ approach flattens and ignores. The claim of linguistic equivalence can only be seen as true if the way we look at language is one that mutes the unique contribution of language itself - the ability to reveal the qualitative. 

To return to the original question of linguistic relativity, what can we now contribute? A given language will be qualitatively distinct from all others. This is not just an aesthetic frivolity, but a hard physical fact in that the mouth moves in ways unlike other languages. Indeed, every idiolect of every person and each mood that they ever slip into or cold they contract or impression they do of someone else, is yet another branching off of the quality of language. This is obvious, but worth saying, because in the subjective viewing of language as a muted communicative tool, this fact is shelved in favour of a flat and indiscriminate equivocation. It is exactly like the notion that all architecture or music or art are inherently comparable, for the moral cowardice of stumbling upon an inegalitarian conclusion.

The same is true at a group level. I have yet to meet an Italian who likes the sound of German, and indeed there is a widespread perception of it being an “ugly” language - one which I have to say, whether the result of subconscious contrarianism or not - I do not feel myself. I’ve always been very attracted to it as a language, but what I must readily admit is that it does not have something that Italian, or any other language, has.

Locating exactly what that something is is quite hard. Sure, it is extremely useful to identify the specific phonemes that we might associate with “harshness” or conversely with beauty or prettiness, but none who have heard a choir sing Stille Nacht can say German cannot sound beautiful. Indeed, when trying to illustrate the inherent ugliness of one language or the other, people will heavily accentuate their voice to evoke a quality that they insist is inherent to the language itself.

Does this not bring us back to the same conclusion of modern linguistics again? If language’s attractiveness or ugliness is just perception-based and without firm grounding? Languages are not works of art, nor are they buildings or even (though they are closest to) music. They are entire worlds unto themselves and unless understood as such we can get no further in this inquiry. Of course any “world” that houses a people who speak a given language has a home for beauty, for rage, for vulgarity and for sadness. Just as we saw earlier, languages are too big to not have a capacity for the abstract, likewise can any people live without beautiful sounds and words? I will not say that every language is equally beautiful, no more than anything is equally anything, which nothing is, but what is true is that the way of being beautiful is what most observably differs between languages and what we can identify as a salient conclusion from among the confusion of this topic.

Galimberti states the case for the qualitative divergence between languages as being something scientifically demonstrable to the degree that one language would literally be blind to abstract thought. This misstep reminds me of how young-earth creationists ironically scientificise their own religion and set it forth as making a kind of truth-claim that it never made before the era of scientific materialism. Galimberti and other linguistic relativists make the same error, they make a truth claim that cannot stand and as such lose the ability to engage with what there truly is to say about language - not that language causes us to think whole different things or that through language we have quantifiably different lives, but instead that language characterises the way in which those thoughts exist to us.

So - are people wrong to hear German as “ugly”? Are people wrong to see English as “instrumental”? Can we say whether perceptions of a foreign language, or of one’s own, especially after stepping over the Rubicon of learning another and never seeing your own in quite the same light again, is “valid”? Differently put: is this something “true”, or a mutable cultural attitude, conditioned into us? The observation made earlier of linguistic “entropy” as fusional grammatical structures break down in later forms of a language can be critiqued as wholly culturally relative to a European context, which historically valorised Latin as the golden language from which latter forms have degenerated. Chinese, for instance, is a very analytic language and the same cultural attitudes towards grammatical inflection do not apply in that context. Again, one who sees language as qualitatively distinct across time and geography could make the Galimbertian error - declaring analytical languages to be inherently less civilised and decayed when compared with fusional ones. I think it is entirely possible for both civilisations to regard a variety of their language with prestige or veneration and to regard the changes into later forms as losing that quality without either of them being “wrong” about this. We must remember - these are worlds unto themselves. These things are all relational and interdependent. To those in a world that remembers a highly inflected language, an analytical one will reveal itself as possessing a certain quality and they will not be wrong for perceiving it. What is crucial to note is that there is nothing arbitrary at work here. It’s fiendishly complicated and impossible to unravel - language is perhaps the hardest thing to address taxonomically.

When you move somewhere for the first time it is closed to you. The unfamiliar  landscape and buildings seem shut behind eyelids that haven’t yet opened themselves; opaque somehow. As you get used to the lay of the streets your area ceases to be a series of blank objects but instead reveals itself to you as a “neighbourhood”. You feel and know something of that place; something that was always there, but was inaccessible. The character and quality of that place, as separate from its material properties. What is crucial is that you do not see anything different to what you saw originally; the difference is only in the way that it shows itself to you. 

The same is true of language. I do not wish here to emphasise the semiotic difference between hearing a language as a fluent speaker and someone without any knowledge of it, although that could also be investigated. What is of note is that intangible sense of being - that world that, whether seen from the outside and not fully accessed, or inhabited and effortlessly lived, exists regardless of whether it can be accounted for in the reckoning of blind instruments that record and account for things in a way that ignores that line. The quantitative notion of place or of language is legible on either side of that subtle divide - it obliterates such distinction. “Knowing a place” or that which there is to be “known” about a place or language cannot be accounted for. 

Concluding Remarks

It was not my aim here to take a hammer to linguistics as a discipline or to accuse it of any bad methodology. I would not say either that scientific-linguistics thinks itself the singular guardian of discussions on language, nor would I act like I am in any sense treading new ground in applying philosophy to this topic. My aim here was to help bring clarity to a very dense discussion around the nature of language and to bring into focus how this densest of all topics cannot be accessed through exclusive reference to a scientific method - one which I do not for a moment wish to dismiss - I have been a keen wiktionary reader and linguistics enthusiast since my teen years and that has not changed. What I would submit is that, while building a clear picture of language is interesting in its own right, this method perhaps doesn’t know exactly what to do with that picture. It is for this that we need to look elsewhere.

This post quickly burst its bounds as an outgrowth of the already overgrown Worldlore post about “spirit”. I have been eager to draw hard connections throughout this essay to the emerging statement of philosophy on this blog - most notably with reference to Heidegger. I felt that this essay was already overlong and decided to dedicate a whole post to Heidegger’s takes on language specifically, building on this one. This has also been my first experiment in using Substack’s paywall. As much as it makes me feel a bit dirty, the amount of time I spend on these needs justifying - I’d like to write and make content full time and if that is at all possible then I will pursue it.

I hope to see you in the next one, cheers.

1. Ellul, J. The Technological Society, p286.

2. Nietzsche, F. Beyond Good and Evil, p252.

3. Apart from British Idealism for a while (and Carlyle was a Scotsman).

4. Nietzsche, F. Beyond Good and Evil, p252.

5. Galimberti, U. “La Lingua Inglese”, YouTube.com.