Abuse of alphabets in Jonathan Sack’s The Great Partnership

Now that I’ve gotten over my shock and horror (I, II, III), here is a straightforward summary of the errors that underlie one of the central arguments of the chief rabbi’s attempt at a grand synthesis of spirituality with science.

Sacks’ argument runs that Hebrew (being written right-to-left and without vowels) engages the right hemisphere of the brain (and so engenders or conduces a right-brain worldview), whereas Greek (being written left-to-right and with vowels) engages the left hemisphere (and so engenders or conduces a left-brain worldview). Hence, Sacks asserts, removing the Hebraic (Judeo-Christian) element of our society makes it, and us, one-sided, unbalanced, unstable: wholesome societies are comprised of whole people who use the left and right hemispheres of their brains.

What follows is simply a list of three types of errors in his writing-systems-based argument: failures of fact, of unconsidered alternatives, and of “big picture” synthesis. I leave you draw your own conclusions.

But please don’t read this as: “Oh, Sacks got his linguistics wrong. Guess I’d better skip that bit and read the rest of the book.” The questions the list of errors raises are: How difficult would it have been to avoid these errors? How likely is that The Great Partnership really understands and values science and scholarship? Is it really qualified to offer “big picture” solutions concerning society, knowledge, and meaning?

You can’t fight off a locust swarm with a fly swat. So, if I concentrate on the abuse of alphabets, it’s not because there aren’t problems elsewhere. I’m just tending to my own backyard. (Not that I’m ruling out adding in another couple of cents’ worth later…)

Errors arising from failure to check or reflect on basic facts

1. Hebrew does not write without vowels.

EVIDENCE. If so, gamal (camel), gamul (weaned), gimel (letter ג), and gomel (benefactor)—and gmala, gmali, gmalo (her/my/his camel), etc.—would all be written identically. They aren’t.

2. Presence of vowels does not mean that Greek (English) is read letter by letter, as opposed to ‘big picture’-wise reading for “vowelless” Hebrew.

EVIDENCE. The closest we come to letter-by-letter reading is when we encounter unknown words, like isobutylparaben. Otherwise, we recognise words in a single glance. This is the basis of the common psycholinguistic/neurolinguistic experimental technique of ‘masked priming’, in which subjects read words that are flashed at them so quickly that they are not aware of having seen anything.

3. Reading in Greek (English) versus Hebrew (Arabic) does not show opposite lateralization.

EVIDENCE. See the left lateralization (left inferior fusiform gyrus and left middle fusiform gyrus) of brains reading Hebrew and English here. (Besides a lit review, I followed up with researchers in Jerusalem, London, Paris, and in the joint New York University – Abu Dhabi research team.)

4. Purported generalization. Voweled scripts run left-to-right. Vowelless run right-to-left.

COMMENT. The Great Partnership asserts that the opposing voweliness and direction of Greek and Hebrew cannot be coincidence. If this statement is meant to cover just Greek and Hebrew, then it is a basic error of reasoning: with only two data points, any correlation could be a coincidence. The statement only has content if taken as a generalization, in which case it is clearly false.

EVIDENCE. Voweled scripts not running left-to-right: Ladino, Meroitic, Mongolian, Sogdian, Sorani, Thaana (Maldives), Yiddish. Vowels are largely predictable in Iatmul, Kalam, Maltese, Yimas, yet these are not written right-to-left.

Errors arising from failure to consider alternative explanations.

5. Ancestry and ambient systems, not vowellessness, account for direction.

EVIDENCE. Hebrew and other Semitic scripts inherit right-left direction from Proto-Sinaitic, which inherited it from hieratic. Voweled right-left scripts with inherited/borrowed direc- tion: Ladino (from Hebrew), Meroitic (from Egyptian), Thaana (from Arabic), Yiddish (from Hebrew). Similarly, Iatmul, etc. inherit direction from Latin (or daughter systems). Vertical inheritance or borrowing from Chinese (or daughter systems): Japanese, Korean, Manchurian, Mongolian, Old Uyghur, ’Phags Pa, Sogdian.

6. Being an Afroasiatic (Semitic) language accounts for the capacity substantially to underrepresent vowels (what TGP misnames “vowellessness”).

EVIDENCE. In all of the following cases, parent scripts are used for Afroasiatic languages, daughter scripts for non-Afroasiatic ones: Greek (Hellenic) added vowels to the Phoeni- cian script; Ladino (Romance), to Hebrew; Meroitic (isolate), to Egyptian (hierogryphs and hieratic); Sogdian (Iranian) to Syriac; Sorani (Iranian), to Arabic; Yiddish (Germanic) to Hebrew.

7. Underrepresentation of vowels in Afroasiatic languages is derivative of a grammatical quirk (not of directionality, or other causes).

EVIDENCE. Afroasiatic languages have the property that prefixes/suffixes predict (to within a small margin of error) the vowels of the root. E.g., m (the present participial prefix; cf, English ing), prefixed to a verb determines the missing vowels (e.g., MSPR = mesaper; MTYL = metayel; MGMZ = megamez, etc.; or, if t is also present, e.g., MTPRD = mitpared; MTGDL = mitgadel; MTRSN = mitrasen; etc.).

COMPARISON I. Predictable material is generally omitted in writing systems. E.g., English does not represent the change in vowels triggered by ity in rapid ∼ rapidity (rapəd ∼ rəpid-ity), nor the stress shift (rápid ∼ rapíd-ity), nor the aspiration (rapid ∼ rap^hid-ity).

COMPARISON II. English, like most non-Afroasiatic languages, does not have affixes that deter- mine the vowels within the verb. Consider Wh’s dltng? The verbal suffix ng can only have its vowel filled in in one way, ing. But this tells us nothing about the vowels missing from the verb root: deleting, dilating, diluting, adulating, …?

Global, cumulative error

8. It is meaningless to compare Greek and Hebrew in point of vowels and direction.

REASON I. Hebrew direction is derivative of older systems. So, you should compare Greek with Proto-Sinaitic, or the Egyptian of Amenemhat III. Comparing Greek and Hebrew is as meaningful as comparing English/Yimas with Egyptian.

REASON II. There is no reason to believe that there is any significance to Greek direction. Where there is little or no pressure to preserve or adopt a given direction and/or the system is radically redesigned, there may be experimentation with alternative directions. Such experimentation may happen in the absence of vowels (e.g., Sabean).

REASON III. Presence/absence of vowels correlates with the grammatical properties of the linguistic families to which Greek and Hebrew belong.

The Great Partnership, or Titanic meets Iceberg: Why the chief rabbi’s alphabet soup has god spinning in his grave. Part I.

There are few things more exhilarating than seeing an argument that you disagree with put well. It’s been more than ten years since I first wrote about what atheists have that makes them atheist and what theists lack that gives them a gap for faith to fill (An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Atheism). Since then, atheism has become a hot topic, though one inclined at times to give off more heat than light.

Enter Jonathan Sacks, who weighed his Cambridge grounding in formal philosophy and found it wanting, who rose to become chief rabbi, and who now frequently runs the fevered gauntlet of the BBC’s Thought for the Day (in which a cleric must dowse a burning secular issue in the cooling balm of ancient creed).

With such qualifications, I fully expected him to emerge, like the biblical Daniel, unscalded and unscathed from the atheist inferno. I wasn’t awaiting conversion, but I did expect The Great Partnership, the result of his lifelong journey between philosophy and faith, to challenge ideas and arguments that satisfied me in my twenties.

Intending to write a review, I opened the book, sharp of mind and of pencil, filling the margins in my wake. Pretty soon, though, the marginalia ceased and the chief feeling I have on closing its covers is one of disappointment. The argument is largely concerned with reconciling science and religion. But Titanic’s problem wasn’t the tip of the iceberg but what lay beneath—which is why An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Atheism, from the start, plunged down to the worldviews that underpin science and religion, where Sacks, oblivious, skims along the surface.

The Great Partnership deserves Titanic’s fate. When he reviews arguments that others have made before him, Sacks is competent. But when his case demands originality of thought, whether to frame questions or offer answers, the result is not searing, but soggy. Not fireproof, but waterlogged. Platitudinous and complacent.

I won’t show this at length. I don’t think the book merits it. What I offer instead is a proxy-review, like those offered to Shmuley Boteach and Fred Reed. I’ll take just one part of the book and show that the high number of basic, easily avoidable errors disqualifies its author from the ranks of serious commentators.

Writing systems are central to how Sacks makes his case. Not only are they prominent in the book, but the difference between Hebrew and Greek was Sacks’ icebreaker on the BBC’s Start the Week. Doubtless, he could have opened otherwise (the book is, after all, mostly meandering and autobiographical, impressionistic and anecdotal). Yet, if aleph-beth versus alphabet is how he chooses to make his big splash, to prove he’s an intellectual supertanker, on national radio, on a Monday morning, then clearly this is not incidental to his thought. This proud prow of his case is thus a fair point for testing how seaworthy that thinking is.

But I must emphasize: this is not a review of the rabbi’s linguistics. Nor am I interested in what led him to make to errors so numerous, basic and avoidable (complacency? hubris? incompetence?). My point is that is if this is the intellectual prowess of this much praised salvo of newfangled anti-atheism—from an academically trained philosopher, a community leader, a veteran of public communication, a stalwart of interfaith dialogue—then it is a very sorry state of affairs. Little could do more to sink the idea that the religious voice will guide us through turbulent seas, or that it constitutes an intellectually defensible position, than this snapshot of (complacent? hubristic? incompetent?) analysis from The Great Partnership.

Big splash or damp squib?

Hebrew runs from right to left and is written without vowels. Greek runs from left to right and is written with vowels. This, Sacks claims, cannot possibly be coincidence. And, in the difference, he perceives deep cultural significance. To reconstitute the meaning of a vowelless text, you have to keep the big picture of the text in mind. Such synthesis is a very “right-brain” activity. To read a voweled script, you concentrate on the each individual sign. Such analytic assemblage is a very “left-brain” activity. Thus, the concerns of Jewish culture are about big picture issues of meaning—wholes and holiness—whereas Greek culture is about taking things apart and seeing how they function. More or less: Greeks are from Mars, Jews are from Venus, and you can see it in how they write.

Just this sliver of thought triggers three clarions of alarm bells: one for culture, another for neurology, and the last for the form and function of writing systems. Of course, the rabbi recognizes—or so he says—that his characterization of the two cultures, and of neurology, is a simplification. I’m not sure this is entirely fair to simplifications. It’s a slippery slope from simplification to oversimplification (or, perhaps more aptly, from dumbing down, down to dumb). Whenever the rabbi talks of left-brain cultures, or left brains, or brains, it feels to me we’re sailing in perilous propinquity to land of “Relativity says all things are relative”.

But many people founder on the logic of neuroscience, and thumbnails of cultures, so diffuse and sprawling, are easily misread, like reefs through water. Alphabets, by contrast, offer solid ground, concrete and familiar. The internet abounds with information for the curious (wikipedia, omniglot, ancientscripts). So, if you’re making claims about alphabets, directions, and voweliness, it’s easy to check your facts, encounter alternatives, and develop and test rival hypotheses.

How far and how successfully Sacks has done this speaks to the intellectual integrity of The Great Partnership, and possibly to that of the new anti-atheist enterprise (of which, to judge by the press, Sacks is something of a flagship). After all, if he can’t figure out how to collect facts and check hunches for such straightforward, well documented, hands-on things as ABC’s, what chance does he have of navigating his way, or his followers, through more abstract arguments, such as the relationship of science and religion, the nature of goodness, and the meaning of life?

Part II
Part III

Chomsky, the Pirahã, and turduckens of the Amazon

A seething dispute has burst back into life with the publication of Language: The Cultural Tool (Economist, New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education). I’ve yet to read the book, though I’m pretty sure I will. I admire its author, Dan Everett, as an ex-missionary, who saw the light in those on whom he had sought to foist salvation, as a fieldworker, whose time in the wild is something I can only dream of, and as a defender of one tribe's right to continue its traditions against the depredations of modernity. And I admire his detractors, amongst them, my professor from phd days, David Pesetsky, and my one-time neighbour at MIT, and now near neighbour at UCL, Andrew Nevins.

The Pirahã, and their language, are, Everett believes, different from other groups and other grammars, so different as to threaten Chomsky’s theory of natural language. I wouldn’t describe myself as a card-carrying Chomskian—or as a card-carrying anything. However, my work is inconceivable without the program of research he initiated, and, so, potential Pirahã problems interest me.

Before you venture into foreign terrain, you set your bearings. If all you can see is rainforest, with no clear line of sight to the horizon, then it’s easy to forget your general direction and get caught up in undergrowth and bogged down in mud. So, before I open Everett’s book (or any other), I ask myself what the argument would need to look like to make me reevaluate where my research is headed and why. I’ve found Pirahã very helpful for my work (it’s cited in my last five^(?) papers). Does it really destroy the edifice I’m building?

The Pirahã maelstrom has had two vortices: recursion, and the language–culture connection. Recursion promises/threatens to slay Chomsky, who argues that much of grammar is innate. The language–culture connection promises/threatens to resurrect Whorf, who argues that language shapes how we think. I work on the latter and I’ve written (here, here) on why I choose not to work on the former. For now, I’ll concentrate Chomsky and recursion, because, truth be told, the “Pirahã slays Chomsky” headlines seem to me like errors in elementary reasoning. In other words, the kind of “because” abuse that this blog is named after.

Recipes for recursion
Recursion means sticking something you made earlier into something else. So, preparing perogi (I’m in Kraków just now) isn’t culinary recursion—you’ve just put filling in pastry and left it there—but making borsht with dumplings is—you put something in something to make pirogi and then put your pirogi into your soup. The ultimate in culinary recursion would be turducken, a chicken stuffed inside a duck stuffed inside a chicken (stuffed inside a person).

“Turducken recursion” and “dumpling-borsht recursion” are different and both are found in human language. In “turducken recursion”, you take two things of the same type and put one inside the other—a sentence inside a sentence (Pawel ate the pirogi his mother wanted to sell) or a noun inside a noun (Pawel’s mother’s pirogi). In “dumpling-borsht” recursion, you put something inside something different—a noun inside a verb phrase (ate pirogi) inside a full sentence (Pawel ate pirogi).

Why does recursion matter to Chomsky? Well, one of the ways to think about what he is up to (and how I explain my work at dinner parties) is to pretend the brain is a kind of computer, like an iphone. (Sorry for mixing metaphors, computers with food. But, well, iphones are apples.) Obviously, we share lots of our brain hardware with other animals. But other animals apparently don’t have anything like human languages, not even the vocal, gregarious, communicative ones, not even primates formally schooled in sign languages by eager experimenters. Chomsky has co-written that the crucial difference might be that our hardware at some point became capable of recursion.*

Which recursion does Everett think Pirahã lacks and should Chomsky care? (And why all this talk of “putting inside”, rather than “putting next to”? E.g., why is Pawel’s “inside”, not “next to”, mother’s pirogi?)

Turduckens, iphones, and irrelevance
Everett says that there’s no turducken amongst the Pirahã. No sentence-in-sentence or noun-in-noun. You have duck (Pawel ate pirogi) and you have chicken (His mother wanted their sale), but you’re not getting to ducken, with one inside the other.

But if Everett, and the media, don’t get turducken, they make hoopla. Everett’s claim has been portrayed as a Chomsky-slayer of a fact.** In truth, though, the turducken hunt is a red herring.

My iphone tags my photos to say where I took them. It tells me what’s nearby (cafés, restaurants, museums, shops, ...). It shows me where I am on maps and how to get to where I want to go and which of my friends are nearby. My mother never tags her photos, she never wants to know what’s around her, she never displays herself as a blip on a map, and, if she wants to know if you’re nearby, she calls. But that’s a fact about how my mother has set her iphone up. All location services are off. But that doesn’t mean her iphone can’t provide that information. The computational capacity of our phones is the same, her configuration is just different.

If the Pirahã don’t have turducken sentences, that’s a fact about how their language is configured. It’s not a fact about their hardware. If you kidnapped a Pirahã child (a practice inflicted on numerous indigenous communities) and raised it speaking Portuguese—or, less horrifically, if you exposed it to enough Portuguese for it to grow up bilingual—you’d expect them to be just as capable of learning Portuguese as any other child they were raised with. When Chomsky is concerned with recursion, he is concerned with hardware. The claim is about what brains can learn, not what a particular brain has learned. A dearth of turduckens of the Amazon just doesn’t matter.

Six degrees of separation
Here’s a different path to the same conclusion. “Six degrees of separation”. It’s every Chomskian’s favourite game. You pick some humdrum language, like English, and, with just a tweak here and tweak there, you get yourself up the Amazon without a turducken. The point is to show which exotic delicacies are just familiar fare in fancy sauce. Here’s a pertinent example inspired by the first paper I read in grad school.

What’s the difference between ask and wonder? A normal person will say it’s something about their meanings. Fair enough. But a linguist will it’s about recursion. You can ask what the time is or ask the time. Both are fine. Not so with wonder: you might wonder what the time is, but you can’t wonder the time. Such differences are widespread and don’t appear to depend on meaning. After all, ask and inquire are near synonyms, but I can’t inquire the time. I’m limited to inquiring what the time is.

And now we tweak. Imagine we go, verb by verb, taking everything like ask and making it like inquire, so that it can only combine with a noun, not a sentence-like, “concealed” question. By the time we’re done, English would be on its way to being Pirahã: verbs would no longer be the aperture through which you can turducken one sentence inside another.

Sure, there’d still be relative clauses (Pawel’s mother wanted to sell the pirogi that Pawel ate). But they depend on there being words like that. We could get rid of them too.

Yet, none of this would mean that “English-ish” speakers’ brains had become incapable of recursion. They’d just have turned off their iphones’ location services. No change in hardware, just change in use. So, again, finding a language without turducken recursion is, simply, irrelevant to deciding whether recursion is the crucial component of hardware that makes us computationally competent for language.

Back to borsht and dumplings
We have an expression in English, “to string words together”. This probably reflects what most people think sentences are. Words strung together. One of the major insights of early work by Chomsky & Co is that real generalizations about sentences aren’t phrased in terms of strings. To characterize what is possible a sentence in a language and how possible sentences are related to each other, you don’t talk about which bit follows which other bit. You talk about which two bits were combined first, and about which other bit their combination was combined with next, and so on. Language, in the computery, grammatical sense relevant to Chomsky, is not about strings, it’s about structures.

If Pirahãs’ lack of turducken recursion is irrelevant to Chomsky’s claims, can Everett make hoopla from dumpling-borsht recursion instead? Does Pirahã make us think that its sentences are not built up by this kind of recursion? Three things make me sceptical that Language: The Cultural Tool can show this.

First, the rhetoric. If Pirahã has such sentences, then it is remarkable for what it has, not for what is missing. It would have sentence types that can’t come from recursion, rather than merely not having certain types that do. Yet, all discussion I’ve seen has focused exclusively on what Pirahã lacks. Quite a U-turn.

Second, a point-by-point rebuttal of Everett’s earlier formulations, indicated where Pirahã is similar to Chinese, German, and Hebrew, amongst others. So, if Chinese, etc don’t have sentence types irreconcilable with recursion, then Pirahã probably doesn’t either.

Third, it is not hard to show what a theory cannot do. For all I admire Everett for his post-missionary enlightment, his time in the field, his advocacy of indigenous rights, and his desire to go beyond descriptive work and engage with the foundations of cognition—something I share—I have to recognize that discussion of turduckens and iphones suggests that Everett isn’t the person to do this. The task requires good basic logic and an understanding of the fundamentals of the theories you’re trying to engage with. Turduckens and iphones may seem like silly metaphors, but they reveal, in familiar and concrete terms, Everett’s errors in logic (arguing from irrelevant data) and in understanding (the crucial distinction between linguistic hardware versus its use in a given language). This does not bode well.

Ready for incursion
Not everyone is good at everything. My mother can’t use location services on her iphone, and, frankly, I’m not a fan of the thought of turducken. But my mother doesn’t preach the downfall of Apple and I don’t portray myself as an expert turduckenist.

There’s more to Language: The Cultural Tool than recursion (watch for future posts). But then why all this hoopla about its impact on Chomsky’s view of our mental hardware, if the main subject of the book in all likelihood has nothing of relevance to contribute? Having marshalled my thoughts, I will open the book with a heavy heart. I’ve seen a laudable fieldworker produce lamentable theory before.

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*So all you need to get Dostoyevski is a monkey brain and recursion? No. When Chomsky talks about language, he’s talking only about our computational hardware. Your hardware needs a set of concepts to compute over and, once there are enough people who can also compile their concepts into beautifully articulated thoughts, it’s pretty handy to have some way of getting thoughts out of your head and into theirs: communication—which potentially raises new computational questions, about flattening thoughts built by recursion into sequences sayable/signable one bit at a time. For the curious, I should add that I focus as much on the store of concepts as on building by recursion, if not more. So, I’m not as deeply involved in these issues as some.

**There’s been debate about whether it is a fact at all: he previously found turducken in his neck of the Amazon, and there’s dis-ag-ree-ment about whether he’s been able to reanalyze the examples at stake as separate sentences standing side by side.

Thoughtful and lucid on language and thought: Guy Deutscher ‘Through the Language Glass’

“Ever heard of es-tchay-den-frood?” asked the husband. “No, what is it?” un-answered the wife. “‘Relishing someone else’s misfortune’,” quoted back the husband. “It’s in this article that says how the language you speak affects how you think.” “Yeah, I’d have thought that,” thoughtfully responded the wife. I almost choked on my breakfast.

I doubt this blog has much of a readership, and I hardly expect to be influencing the august editors of International Herald Tribune (yet), but the timing was pretty vexing nonetheless: first Behavioural and Brain Sciences (article, response), then the Wall Street Journal (article, response), now this. The myth-peddling assault on sensible research into language rolls on unabated. So, I quickly left the breakfast room, retrieved our complimentary paper, and checked the article out. Sure enough, the title promised a parade of the usual errors: “Same planet, different worlds: Languages shaping reality”. And on the front page. The heart sinks, the brain revs.

The article (link), by Guy Deutscher (webpage), turns out to be a pleasant surprise, however (the title, perhaps, an editor’s addition): a deft and elegant style, facts simply not simplistically communicated, and, most importantly, avoidance of the array of errors that usual besmirch discussion of the link between language and thought. Deutscher identifies straightaway that the connection is one of tracks, not traps. That is, speaking Hopi doesn’t leave you trapped in a mindset that forever prevents you from learning to use the English word ‘time’. Rather, as speakers of English, or other languages, we get into the habit of thinking along certain tracks: we pay attention to some aspects of situations and fail to attend to others, because competent use of our day-to-day language has set us up with certain habits of expression and, hence, foci of attention, and, hence, patterns of thought. For the rest of the article, Deutscher illustrates this with two examples:

• Speakers of, say, Spanish and German are inclined to describe bridges (amongst other things) in different ways, e.g., ‘strong’ versus ‘slender’. The choices they make may, plausibly, reflect differences in grammatical gender: for Spaniards, bridges are masculine, for Germans, feminine, and strength is a masculine property, slenderness a female one.
• Speakers of Guugu Yimithirr—a language of northern Queensland, that eschews terms like ‘left’, ‘right’, ‘in front’, ‘behind’ for ‘to the north’, ‘to the south’, etc.—use and can recall details of cardinal directions in a way that the average city-bound English speaker can’t.

In both cases, it isn’t that Spanish speakers have thoughts about bridges unthinkable to Germans, or Guugu Yimithirr speakers have thoughts involving locations unthinkable to English speakers. Rather, it’s that there are certain thoughts that are more likely to occur to Spaniards than Germans, or Guugu Yimithirr than English speakers, in virtue of their respective languages.

My liking of the article notwithstanding, I’m unsure of what Deutscher thinks that these two examples are meant to show us. To me, they seem to show that society affects how people act, and, as action includes using language in an socially appropriate fashion, it affects how they speak and how they get ready to speak, that is, how they think. So, I don’t think either example shows us much about how language, alone, influences thought. Rather, they show how society influences thought—a conclusion that is surely unsurprising.

To make this clearer, consider first Spanish versus German. I question whether any association that speakers have between bridges and manliness/womanliness arises spontaneously, simply from using their native tongue, rather than from being put through an education system that tells them to think of nouns in terms of masculinity/femininity. The dichotomy between the genders is a socially central and salient one. Plausibly, it works its way, via grammatical terminology inculcated in the educational system, through to speakers’ conceptions of these objects. To be sure that it is language (a linguistic fact), rather than how society teaches people to think about their language (a social fact), that is at work in the ‘bridge effect’, we would want to look at Spanish and German speakers who are so far removed from formal education that they do not know anything about traditional grammatical gender terminology (such speakers might be found in rural parts of Latin America and, just possibly, amongst the Pennsylvania Dutch, or like communities). If they describe bridges in sex-biased terms, then we might have something to explain. If not, then we should conclude that how society tells people to think about their languages affects how people think about their languages down even to the level of the common noun—an interesting conclusion, but hardly compelling evidence of language influencing thought independent of ambient social facts.

And an incident from my time doing fieldwork makes me question Deutscher’s second example. When I’ve asked for directions from one place to the next, those directions have most often been in the form of cardinal directions: “Head south for two miles, then turn west, then ...”. I found this somewhat irritating at first (“Why can’t they just left-and-right me?”, I used to wonder). However, once the directions cease to involve roads but cross fields and follow rivers, it becomes pretty obvious. If you have to “turn left at the next road”, then it doesn’t matter whether than road is at 30 degrees to your current road, or at 60, or 113: following the road takes care of that. Try telling someone without a compass to turn left by 113 degrees and you soon appreciate that “head south for two miles, then turn west, then ...” is the superior system, once you’ve learned to use it. The crucial fact, however, is that I wasn’t off in the extremities of Australia, but smack in the middle of rural Oklahoma, and the people giving me directions were, more often than not, monolingual English speakers, sometimes just as white as me.

Obviously, Guugu Yimithirr culture and language have evolved in a world of without a grid of tarmacked roads leading you at just the right angle to get you where you want to go to. And, as a child, you don’t just learn the grammar of a language, or its lexicon, you learn what to talk about in day-to-day life and how to talk about it too. For objective reasons, cardinal directions play a prominent role in Guugu Yimithirr culture and, as a cultural fact, when you speak Guugu Yimithirr, you adorn your description of an event, it seems, with facts about these directions. In a similar vein, I remember the first time I read Warlpiri story, from a different part of Australia. It basically said that there was a group of people who headed in this direction, then that direction, then off in another, and ended, I think, with them being back where they started: no comment on why they left, what they found, what they did, or what it was like to get back again. (“Yep, that sounds about right,” said Ken Hale and Norvin Richards, who have, respectively, superabundant and abundant experience documenting Australian languages.) If Guugu Yimithirr culture is anything like the Warlpiris’ in this respect, then directions matter to the extent that recounting them is enough to create a story of interest.

As with Spanish and German, it seems to me that what makes Guugu Yimithirr different from English is not a linguistic fact (a case of language guiding thought), but a set of social facts that appear linguistic because they are bound up with language use:

• It is a social fact that the world you live in and the life you lead there are better served by cardinal directions than by lefts and rights.
• Whether your language has ‘left’ and ‘right’ is a linguistic fact, but how much your community expects you to mention directions when retelling events is a social fact. (Guugu Yimithirr could, one imagines, adopt ‘left’ and ‘right’ from English but use these only for humans, maintain a social preference for locating objects and events in terms of norths and souths.)
• And whether sequences of directions alone suffice to make a story worth telling is certainly a social fact.

Deutscher wonders, with admirable tentativeness, “how geographic languages [like Guugu Yimithirr] affect areas of experience other than spatial orientation—whether they influence the speaker’s sense of identity, for instance, or bring about a less-egocentric outlook on life”. However, these questions strike me as premature: we still don’t have good reason for thinking that it is language, rather than social facts about language use, that are at play here.

It is an open, and probably prickly, question as to how one should tease apart purely linguistic influence on thought from social influence, mediated by patterns of language use, on thought. My suspicion, in part confirmed by Deutscher’s article, is that what is advertised as the former is in reality more often the latter. What the cases Deutscher considers probably show therefore is that society and socialisation influence how and what people think about (no surprise there) and that this influence infiltrates down to the level of quite subtle facts about language. In principle, the latter finding is not so surprising, but the precise details doubtless will be intriguing. I suspect that we are still far from knowing whether language itself, abstracted away from the society that speaks it, can influence thought and I doubt that the experiments devised to test the hypothesis are in principle capable of speaking to the issue. However, given how well Deutscher’s article frames the question and presents key research, I think his forthcoming book (link) will be an excellent way to confirm or disconfirm such suspicions.

Does thought influence language? Well, at times, ...

The extent to which language influences thought is an old and ongoing debate in cognitive science. I wish that the debate would show equal concern for letting thought influence language. In a recent article (Wall Street Journal), Lera Boroditsky (cool website) outlines some recent research in her field: it is imaginative and fascinating and there’s no doubt in my mind it makes substantial and significant contributions. However, I was struck by Boroditsky’s attempt to situate her work against the purported failure of Chomsky’s approach to language. Tying one’s work to one of the central figures of cognitive science adds caché, especially if one is overturning what that figure has said. But what the article presents reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what language is and which aspects of it generative linguistics attempts to study.

Boroditsky writes: “Dr. Chomsky proposed that there is a universal grammar for all human languages essentially, that languages don’t really differ from one another in significant ways. And because languages didn’t differ from one another, the theory went, it made no sense to ask whether linguistic differences led to differences in thinking. // The search for linguistic universals yielded interesting data on languages, but after decades of work, not a single proposed universal has withstood scrutiny.” This not only misrepresents universal grammar and its investigation but also misconceives which aspects of language Chomsky et al’s versus Boroditsky’s et al’s research relates to.

Chomsky’s proposal is that languages do not significantly differ from each other in terms of narrow syntax, that is, in terms of syntactic algorithms and the set of primitives over which those algorithms operate. The kinds of universals that arise with this approach are statements like:

• All branching is maximally binary.
• Extraction is only possible from phase edges.
• Minimality of attraction is relativized to particular features.

What Boroditsky has in mind (I’m willing to bet) are universals of the form:

• Any language with head-internal relative clauses permits null subjects.
• Any language that is verb-initial has construct states.
• All languages have pronouns.

The difference between these two types of universals is massive: one concerns the deep infrastructure of language, the other, the superficial description of its output. (This misunderstanding also afflicts a much discussed paper by Evans and Levinson, BBS, and I wonder whether it represents a prevalent misapprehension.) However, to anyone who understands what generative linguistics is concerned with, it is wholly obvious that the entire research program of universal grammar could be successfully completed without there being a single universal of the latter (superficial) variety. Universals of output simply aren’t the universals that universal grammar is concerned with and unless Boroditsky knows something surprising about binary branching, long-distance extraction, and relativised minimality, her claim that no universals have “withstood scrutiny” “after decades of research” is simply untrue.

That said, although universal grammar does not require superficial universals, it should be emphasised that universals derived from the nature of the primitives over which syntax operates (rather than from the syntactic algorithms themselves) remain in good health “after decades of research”: feature systems with a dual still differentiate singular from plural, and those with a trial still differentiate singular, plural and dual; feature systems with a three-way person contrast still conflate first inclusive with first exclusive, not with second person; and there is still no choric-hearer or choric-speaker feature system. So, universal grammar doesn’t need superficial universals, but it has them anyway.

Yet, even if Boroditsky’s motivational critique of Chomsky is wrong, that hardly means her work is without motivation. The domains of study of the two approaches are substantially without overlap. Consider some of Boroditsky’s examples.

• English, Hebrew and Pormpuraaw speakers may arrange pictures differently to reflect chronological sequence, but this tell us nothing about how narrow syntax works, because representation of chronological sequence has nothing to do with binary branching, extraction, etc. The irrelevance of this data is underlined by Boroditsky’s own observation that the Hebrew versus English orderings reflect the directions in which the two languages are written: writing systems are means of representing the output of universal grammar, parametrized to a given language, after it has passed through the morphological, phonological and phonetic systems; they are very distant from the study of universal grammar itself.

• Lexical facts—such as whether Russian speakers, who lack a cover term for sky blue and navy blue, are more attuned to different shades of these colours than are English speakers to whom they are both blue—are also irrelevant to how syntax may construct long-distance dependencies or whether syntactic branching is binary. Much variation in the lexicon fails to impact on syntax: elks are nothing like elephants, but one struggles to find syntactic ramifications of this fact.

• English and Japanese both have constructions that identify and ignore agency, but their different rates of usage represents a sociological fact about language usage, not anything to do with differences in the narrow syntax. If your society generally expects you to impute agency when speaking whatever language it uses, then, it turns out that you are more attuned to agency. This is not overly surprising: when my lifestyle includes a lot of violin playing, my intolerance for others’ off-key playing increases. Speaking English is part of my lifestyle, so why should the set of distinctions that being a member of an English-speaking society routinely makes me make not be just like having perfect pitch? The propensity of English speakers to identify causes reflects a sociolinguistic fact, not something that universal grammar is concerned with.

It is irritating that such errors of logic and such misrepresentations of generative linguistics should have been made in so public a forum as the Wall Street Journal. What’s more worrying to me, however, is the persistent gap in understanding by other cognitive scientists as to what universal grammar is about, what evidence could falsify it, and how other research enterprises may pertain to language and yet be orthogonal to it.