The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker Page B

most mundane and unremarkable fact. Horsebreeders have various names for breeds, sizes, and ages of horses; botanists have names for leaf shapes; interior decorators have names for shades of mauve; printers have many different names for fonts (Carlson, Garamond, Helvetica, Times Roman, and so on), naturally enough…. Would anyone think of writing about printers the same kind of slop we find written about Eskimos in bad linguistics textbooks? Take [the following] random textbook…, with its earnest assertion “It is quite obvious that in the culture of the Eskimos…snow is of great enough importance to split up the conceptual sphere that corresponds to one word and one thought in English into several distinct classes…” Imagine reading: “It is quite obvious that in the culture of printers…fonts are of great enough importance to split up the conceptual sphere that corresponds to one word and one thought among non-printers into several distinct classes…” Utterly boring, even if true. Only the link to those legendary, promiscuous, blubber-gnawing hunters of the ice-packs could permit something this trite to be presented to us for contemplation.
     
    If the anthropological anecdotes are bunk, what about controlled studies? The thirty-five years of research from the psychology laboratory is distinguished by how little it has shown. Most of the experiments have tested banal “weak” versions of the Whorfian hypothesis, namely that words can have some effect on memory or categorization. Some of these experiments have actually worked, but that is hardly surprising. In a typical experiment, subjects have to commit paint chips to memory and are tested with a multiple-choice procedure. In some of these studies, the subjects show slightly better memory for colors that have readily available names in their language. But even colors without names are remembered fairly well, so the experiment does not show that the colors are remembered by verbal labels alone. All it shows is that subjects remembered the chips in two forms, a nonverbal visual image and a verbal label, presumably because two kinds of memory, each one fallible, are better than one. In another type of experiment subjects have to say which two out of three color chips go together; they often put the ones together that have the same name in their language. Again, no surprise. I can imagine the subjects thinking to themselves, “Now how on earth does this guy expect me to pick two chips to put together? He didn’t give me any hints, and they’re all pretty similar. Well, I’d probably call those two ‘green’ and that one ‘blue,’ and that seems as good a reason to put them together as any.” In these experiments, language is, technically speaking, influencing a form of thought in some way, but so what? It is hardly an example of incommensurable world views, or of concepts that are nameless and therefore unimaginable, or of dissecting nature along lines laid down by our native languages according to terms that are absolutely obligatory.
    The only really dramatic finding comes from the linguist and now Swarthmore College president Alfred Bloom in his book The Linguistic Shaping of Thought . English grammar, says Bloom, provides its speakers with the subjunctive construction: If John were to go to the hospital, he would meet Mary . The subjunctive is used to express “counterfactual” situations, events that are known to be false but entertained as hypotheticals. (Anyone familiar with Yiddish knows a better example, the ultimate riposte to someone reasoning from improbable premises: Az di bobe volt gehat beytsim volt zi geven mayn zeyde , “If my grandmother had balls, she’d be my grandfather.”) Chinese, in contrast, lacks a subjunctive and any other simple grammatical construction that directly expresses a counterfactual. The thought must be expressed circuitously, something like “If John is going to the hospital…but he is not going to the