From bible-researcher.com comes The Effect of Language upon Thinking by Michael Marlowe:
In recent discussions about theories and methods of translation one often encounters general statements about the relationship of language to thought. Some theorists maintain that the peculiarities of a given language do not significantly affect the thinking of those who speak or write in that language, and so the differences between languages are largely accidental or irrelevent to the meaning of the text. These theorists have a very optimistic view of the ability of translators to put the meaning of a text into different languages in ways that are perfectly natural or idiomatic for the “receptor” languages. For example, the New Testament scholar D.A. Carson says in one place, “Although it is true that [the meanings of] words only partially overlap between languages, nevertheless ‘all languages can talk about the same meaning, and for that matter about all meanings.’ It is just that [translators] ... may have to use entirely different constructions, or resort to paraphrasis ...” 1 Other writers maintain that differences between languages are such that an accurate translation must frequently be unidiomatic in the receptor language, because the idiomatic contructions and usages of the receptor language cannot capture the foreign modes of thought which are inherent in the language of the original text.
The idea that languages affect the way we think has been called a “fallacy” by Carson and by others who advocate paraphrastic translations, and one gets the impression from them that this idea has no standing at all among the “linguistically informed,” as Carson puts it. 2 The idea is portrayed as being an eccentric minority opinion which hardly deserves serious consideration. In this essay I will try to show that the case is otherwise. I will argue that most “liguistically informed” people are, and always have been, of the opinion that language influences thought, and that the contrary opinion has only recently gained the upper hand among professional linguists. It seems to me that the opinion that thought is independent of language has been adopted of late by many linguists only as a theoretical axiom, by those who wish it to be so, without any proof, and that the writers who present this idea as if it were a scientific finding are themselves guilty of a fallacy, because they are treating a presumptive axiom of a school as if it were a conclusion. In science, axioms are often adopted as the basis of hypotheses which are then tested for their adequacy in explaining data collected in some area, and if one hypothesis is found to be more useful than all its rivals it is regarded as “proven” in some sense. But in my reading on this subject I have found that linguists have scarcely begun to test this particular hypothesis in any rigorous scientific fashion, and that most of the research which has been done in recent years suggests that language does influence thought in various ways. Judging by the treatment of the question in journals of the past 30 years it seems to me that linguists who have been opposed in principle to the idea that thought is shaped by language are on the defensive. In any case, it is not true that linguists have arrived at a consensus on the question by any process of scientific proof.
Much of what has been written on this subject by professional linguists focuses rather narrowly on the question of whether the grammar of a language will influence the thinking of its speakers, without any attention being given to how vocabulary might influence thought. But obviously language is more than grammar, and so conclusions about language in general cannot be drawn from studies which deal only with questions of grammar. This essay does not equate language with grammar. The word “language” will be used in reference to the full reality of language, including all the messy details of lexical semantics. I will not enter into all the technicalities of the subject. That would require an introductory course in linguistics. I only aim to give an overview of how the idea that language influences thinking has been expressed in the writings of celebrated philosophers, scientists, literary critics, philologists and linguists. Many of these did not deal with the question in a modern scientific fashion, but I do not think that any of them can be dismissed as linguistically naive. For lack of a better plan I will present this material in historical order.
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At about the same time, the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher published an essay “On the Different Methods of Translating” (1813), in which he expressed the concept thus:
Every human being is, on the one hand, in the power of the language he speaks; he and his whole thinking are a product of it. He cannot, with complete certainty, think anything that lies outside the limits of language. The form of his concepts, the way and means of connecting them, is outlined for him through the language in which he is born and educated; intellect and imagination are bound by it. On the other hand, however, every freethinking and intellectually spontaneous human being also forms the language himself. For how else, but through these influences, would it have come to be and to grow from its first raw state to its more perfect formation in scholarship and art?
Shortly afterwards we find Karl W.F. Solger (professor of philosophy at the University of Berlin), in a series of lectures delivered in 1819, expressing the idea that “thinking” practically depends upon language, and that the two “reciprocally condition each other.”
The origin of speech is one with the origin of thought, which is not possible in reality without speech [welches in der Wirklichkeit ohne Sprache nicht möglich ist]. Thought is subjective speech, as speech is objective thought—the outward appearance of thought itself. Neither is possible without the other; and both reciprocally condition each other.
During this period, scholarly interest in the differences between languages was stimulated by the world-wide missionary efforts undertaken by Christians in Europe and America. A number of missionary societies were formed between 1790 and 1810, and by 1815 they were spreading Christianity in remote areas of the world, which few white men had ever visited before. Christian missionaries were in many cases the first Europeans to learn languages wholly unrelated to the Indo-European languages. A common complaint in their reports was the difficulties they encountered in trying to communicate even the basic concepts of the Christian faith in these exotic languages. In 1817 the English essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote, “The extreme difficulty, and often the impossibility, of finding words for the simplest moral and intellectual processes in the languages of uncivilized tribes has proved perhaps the weightiest obstacle to the progress of our most zealous and adroit missionaries.”
In 1827 a popular theologian on the western frontier of America, Alexander Campbell, published a short essay on the “The Trinitarian System” in which he asserts that it is “universally admitted by the reflecting part of mankind” that “all men think or form ideas by means of words or images.” In an exposition of the first sentence of John’s Gospel he writes:
The Holy Spirit selected the name Word, and therefore we may safely assert that this is the best, if not the only term, in the whole vocabulary of human speech at all adapted to express that relation which existed “in the beginning,” or before time, between our Saviour and his God.
These postulata being stated, I proceed to inquire what sort of a relation does this term represent? And here every thing is plain and easy of comprehension. I shall state numerically a few things universally admitted by the reflecting part of mankind:—
1st. A word is a sign or representative of a thought or an idea, and is the idea in an audible or visible form. It is the exact image of that invisible thought which is a perfect secret to all the world until it is expressed.
2d. All men think or form ideas by means of words or images; so that no man can think without words or symbols of some sort.
3d. Hence it follows that the word and the idea which it represents, are co-etaneous, or of the same age or antiquity. It is true the word may not be uttered or born for years or ages after the idea exists, but still the word is just as old as the idea.
4th. The idea and the word are nevertheless distinct from each other, though the relation between them is the nearest known on earth. An idea cannot exist without a word, nor a word without an idea.
5th. He that is acquainted with the word, is acquainted with the idea, for the idea is wholly in the word.
Now let it be most attentively observed and remembered, that these remarks are solely intended to exhibit the relation which exists between a word and an idea, and that this relation is of a mental nature, and more akin to the spiritual system than any relation created, of which we know any thing. It is a relation of the most sublime order; and no doubt the reason why the name Word is adopted by the apostle in this sentence was because of its superior ability to represent to us the divine relation existing between God and the Saviour prior to his becoming the Son of God. By putting together the above remarks on the term word, we have a full view of what John intended to communicate.
As a word is an exact image of an idea, so is “The Word” an exact image of the invisible God. As a word cannot exist without an idea, nor an idea without a word; so God never was without “The Word,” nor “The Word” without God; or as a word is of equal age, or co-etaneous with its idea, so “The Word” and God are co-eternal. And as an idea does not create its word, nor a word its idea; so God did not create “The Word,” nor “The Word” God.
Although the writings of Campbell give us little reason to think that he had studied the writings of the ancient Church Fathers, his theological use of the concept developed here seems to be an elaboration of the idea briefly expressed by Tertullian, as quoted above.
Back in Germany again, in 1832 a philologist named Johann Adam Hartung wrote:
It is a truth as simple as it is fruitful, that language is no arbitrary, artificial, and gradual invention of the reflective understanding, but a necessary and organic product of human nature, appearing contemporaneously with the activity of thought. Speech is the correlate of thought; both require and condition each other like body and soul, and are developed at the same time and in the same degree, both in the case of the individual and the nation. Words are the coinage of conceptions freeing themselves from the dark chaos of intimations and feelings, and gaining shape and clearness. In so far as a man uses and is master of language, has he also attained clearness of thought; the developed and spoken language of a people is its expressed intelligence.
At about the same time, another German philologist named Wilhelm Von Humboldt was writing a treatise on this subject. For years he had devoted himself to the study of various non-European languages, including those of the American Indians, having obtained grammars and dictionaries of them written by Christian missionaries. He studied tribal languages of the Pacific islands and East Indies as well. In 1836 he published a book titled On the Kawi Language on the Island of Java (1836) with a general introduction on The Diversity of Human Language-Construction and its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind. This introduction was in itself a lengthy treatise, and it has been called “the first great book on general linguistics.” As the title suggests, the diversity (Verschiedenheit) of human languages and cultures, and the connections between language and thought, were major themes of Humboldt’s research. His primary interest was not in the discourse of philosophers (Locke), nor in the artistic language of poets (Herder), but in the ordinary languages of various peoples around the world. Although Humboldt was well aware of the similarities among the languages he studied, he was much impressed with the differences he found, and he believed that these linguistic differences played a part in the maintenance of corresponding differences in culture and mentality between peoples. The following sentence from his treatise summarizes his view of the connection of language to thought.
Man lives with objects [around him] mainly, or rather — as feeling and action depend on the ideas which he entertains about the objects — exclusively in the way in which language presents them to him. The very activity by which he spins language out from within himself eventually gets himself entwined in it, and every language draws a circle around the nation to which it belongs, and which one can only leave to the extent that at the same time one enters the circle of another.
The fundamental idea here is that people use language to think, so languages will tend to shape the thoughts of the peoples who use them. But unlike Bacon and Locke, who spoke of the effects of language mainly in a negative and cautionary way so that people might escape linguistic traps and transcend the limits of ordinary language, Humboldt emphasized the creative and positive aspect of this psychological fact. By adding meaning to the world of objects, languages help their users to make sense of the world, though in diverse ways.
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At the present time there seems to be broad agreement among linguists that language does influence thought in various ways, though not as strongly as Whorf’s statement of the hypothesis quoted above would seem to imply. It is obvious that at least some of us are capable of thinking “outside the box” of language when we make a conscious effort. We are capable of inventing new nouns and verbs to express ourselves if need be. So linguistic determinism must be rejected. But if it is merely a question of whether or not language influences thought, especially in realms such as philosophy and religion, where the mind contemplates abstractions or intangible and unseen realities, probably very few linguists would care to deny that language plays a very important role. Unfortunately, distinctions like this are too often neglected when this issue is discussed at a popular level. For example, Steven Pinker, who may be taken as a representative of those linguists of the “Chomskyan” school who are broadly opposed to the “Sapir-Whorf” hypothesis, has written in a recent book that “there is no scientific evidence that languages dramatically shape their speakers’ ways of thinking.” Of course this raises the question of what Pinker may mean by “dramatically,” but in any case, Pinker’s views are much closer to Whorf’s than readers might suppose from his treatment of the matter in The Language Instinct, because in another place he has written that Whorf was “probably correct” in the sense that “one’s language does determine how one must conceptualize reality when one has to talk about it.” Laymen who are trying to gain an impression of the consensus among prominent linguists on a complex issue like this without a thorough study of the literature are liable to misunderstand them. The views of scholars are often more nuanced than one might suppose after reading a popular-level article or two.
