Dreaming in Hindi (39 page)

Language is innate: that became the rallying cry of the school that formed, called, logically enough, the nativists. In no time, their views held sway, and Skinner was removed from the fore. Whorf was sent to the corner, for the nativists were of the strict (some have said tyrannical) belief that concepts aren't shaped by names and, furthermore, that since all languages operate on one universal, innate grammar, any differences among them are superficial—mere wallpaper, "so much noise." Once these ideas became governing propositions, the question of whether differences in language affect thought was moot, since, perforce, there weren't any.

For a long time after that, if you were engaged in the serious study of language and you were foolish enough to speculate publicly that maybe old Benjamin Lee hadn't got it completely wrong with his theories, which had become known as "linguistic relativity," you were considered to have the same keen mental faculties as people who believed in UFOs. "Discussions of language and thought were about as respectable as discussions of flying saucers," Gentner and Goldin-Meadow write in
Language in Mind,
in the part of the book where they point out that the same academicians who rejected linguistic relativity were, invariably, careful to embrace politically corrected speech—were, for instance, assiduously using "senior citizen" for "old," presumably because "old" had pejorative connotations and
could affect the way people thought.

Whorf's case certainly had not been advanced by the fact that, from time to time through the years, his ideas were hijacked and used to press racist points by academics with murky agendas. They'd begin with the pseudo-Whorfian observation that certain words—certain words, in these instances, used by Westerners and particularly Anglo-Westerners ("right," "wrong," "blue," "gray")—were missing from the vocabularies of certain people (in the category described in times past as "primitive people"), then pole-vault from there to the conclusion that the people in question were, ergo, incapable of complex thought. Perhaps the deficits in complex thinking lay with the authors, since not one of them ever questioned whether the Papuan lexicon, say, contained words that were missing from English.

In addition, Whorf was proved wrong on several fronts, one being in his argument that the Inuit (formerly, Eskimo) have more words for snow than anyone else. They don't, subsequent analysis proved, a correction that linguists were quick to register but that's never fully made its way into common wisdom. (Not long ago, the novelist Christopher Buckley inveighed in a book review, in order to make a point, "The Inuit have—what?—seventeen words for snow?")

There was also the color study upset. In the 1950s, the researcher Eric Lenneberg set out to show that the more words a language has for basic colors, the better the speakers will be at remembering shades: words affect thought, fundamental Whorfian analysis. The range of basic color words that languages use is fairly wide. At one end, you get a count of eleven (the tally for English), at the other end, two. Some tongues have no direct words for colors, but use instead adjectival nouns such as "smoke-smoke" and "grass-grass." Originally, English (and Turkish and Hindi and Rajasthani Sign Language, among others) took a similar approach with "orange"—borrowed the name of the fruit to represent the previously unnamed color. The word "red," to digress some more, turns into
rudhira,
meaning "blood," if you take it far enough back to the Sanskrit. "Blood red," then, strictly speaking, is a tautology.

When Lenneberg investigated this link—between number of words in the vocabulary for colors and ability of the speakers to recall the shades—he found that there was one, suggesting that words do anchor concepts, that language affects thought. But about twenty years on, around the time linguistic relativity was being called into question, another researcher upset these findings—ran tests showing that the Dani people of New Guinea were no more slack than Anglophones at remembering colors, despite the fact that the Dani's basic color vocabulary consisted of two words. The feeling by then was that Whorf had long ago had his day. And that, looked like, was that for him.

To cut to the present: a new movement has taken hold in the field, based on the theories of, yes,
certainement,
Benjamin Whorf. Since the mid-1990s, his beliefs have undergone a renaissance, as a backlash against Chomsky has gathered steam and many earlier studies of linguistic relativity have, on retesting, proved to have merit, Lenneberg's color investigations among them.

Researchers today receive grants to explore every conceivable neo-Whorfian proposition. Does the way a language treat space influence the way speakers think? In Spanish, to give an example, you're
in
the bus for five hours; in English, you're
on
it. What about when a language obliges you to ascribe gender to nouns—does that make a difference in how you see things? At MIT, one linguist applied scientific principles to investigating whether there was a connection between gender use and people's thoughts, with surprising results. Or maybe not so surprising. The researcher, Lera Boroditsky, got two groups of people—one Spanish speaking, one German—to describe photographs of various objects. The items seemed to have been randomly chosen, but in fact, each of them had opposite genders in the two languages—a key, for instance, is masculine in German, feminine in Spanish. What Boroditsky found was that with items that were linguistically feminine, she got largely feminine descriptions; masculine items prompted adjectives that were more traditionally masculine. To the Spanish speakers, the key was "intricate," "lovely," "shiny," "golden"; to the Germans, it was "hard," "heavy," "jagged," "metal." A picture of a bridge—feminine in German, masculine in Spanish—struck the German speakers as "beautiful," "elegant," "fragile," "pretty"; to the Spaniards, it was "big," "dangerous," "long," "strong."

"The private mental lives of people who speak different languages may differ dramatically," concluded Boroditsky, who didn't venture a guess as to what all this meant for people whose nouns don't have gender. Are English speakers' chairs free of sexist overtones? Or is our natural world missing a certain overlay of lyricism?

There's been something of a stampede on to reopen investigations into what influence, if any, color names have on thought. In one study, people who spoke English, which makes a distinction between blue and green, were compared with people who spoke Tarahumara, a Mexican language that doesn't make such a distinction. (So many tongues, in fact, refer to blue and green by the same name that researchers invented one in English for it: "grue.") When shown color chips, the English speakers reported that the samples that were bluish green (i.e., a grue with more blue) were dissimilar from the ones that were greenish blue. The Tarahumara speakers didn't. Other studies like this have come up with the same general results, with one very intriguing methodological exception. If, in the course of the study, you engage people in verbal interference tasks at the same time that they're being quizzed on blue and green—get them to count backward from eight to one, say, while they're trying to identify colors—you find no Whorf effect whatsoever. English speakers will perform about the same as the Tarahumara speakers.

"This suggests that the effect is mediated by some kind of online verbal representation, as opposed to it being a permanent part of your perception," said Terry Regier, a psychology professor at the University of Chicago who's worked on several color studies. "People who want the Whorf hypothesis to be right will look at those results and say they strongly support Whorf: 'The results tell you we took language out of the picture and the effect went away.' People who want Whorf to be wrong like the findings, too. They say, 'Look, this isn't some long-lasting worldview. When the verbal resources aren't there, the effect Isn't there.' The findings are like a Rorschach."

Regier reported that there are a "ton of color studies going on." Not all the new research categories are as crowded. There are fewer experiments being done on whether a language's words for emotions shape how its speakers feel, perhaps because the possibility for racist interpretation is wider here. Does the fact that the Chewong of Malaysia have just seven words for emotions, not one of them describing "sadness," mean that they are a simple, happy people? Or that they have more advanced control over their emotions than do English speakers, who, with two thousand names (by one count) for feeling states, might be viewed as emotionally sloppy down around Kuala Lumpur?

The number of emotions a language contains varies widely. Feelings that exist in one tongue don't in others. It can be disconcerting for a therapized citizen of the English-speaking world to learn that there are places on the globe where people never talk about their anger because they don't have a word for it. People who are monolingual naturally tend to assume that the emotions (i.e., theirs) are universal. Well, aren't they?

Charles Darwin thought so. Emotional expressions are innate and the same for all, he wrote, but then again, Darwin was operating on English only—no basis for comparison. The writer Milan Kundera—who speaks Czech, French, and English—has named one that's not the same for everyone, at least to the extent that no one but the Czechs have anything remotely similar to it in their dictionaries. "
Litost
is a Czech word with no exact translation into any other language," Kundera writes. "It designates a feeling as infinite as an open accordion, a feeling that is the synthesis of many others: grief, sympathy, remorse and an indefinable longing ... I have never found an equivalent in other languages for this sense of the word either...[It] is a state of torment caused by a sudden insight into one's own miserable self."

As soon as you read that, you begin to imagine you know exactly what Kundera is talking about, and that reaction is one of the points of contention that arises in this debate. "Why ... do so many people think that emotions differ from culture to culture?" Steven Pinker asks. "The common remark that a language does or doesn't have a word for [an] emotion means little ... I have never heard a foreign emotion word whose meaning wasn't instantly recognizable." To which the outspoken Polish-born linguist Anna Wierzbicka replies, "The 'instant recognition' of the meaning of foreign emotion words often takes the form of wrongly identifying foreign emotion words." You may think you've recognized the
angst
that lies within, when what you really have in your soul is anxiety.

Several studies have suggested that bilinguals' emotional perceptions of situations may change with the language they are thinking in. A psychology professor named Susan Ervin-Tripp ran some experiments. In one test, she asked a man who was bilingual in Japanese and English to tell a story off the top of his head about drawings she showed him on cards. One, for instance, was of a woman sitting on the floor, head resting on the couch. In the story he came up with in English, the figure was a girl who was finishing a project for sewing class. In the story in Japanese, which he was asked to invent several weeks later, she was a suicidal woman weeping for her lost fiancé.

 

ANNA WIERZBICKA ARGUES
that emotions derive from "cultural scripts," and as such are learned in the language of the culture. Perhaps this explains why, months into learning Hindi, I become keenly aware of a feeling I've never experienced before. It comes from outside me, fills me and the room. It's longing, in a shade I've never known before: for something I can't name but that I know viscerally is unbounded, an object or state that's protean, divine. In English, the closest word for this emotion would be "melancholy," but it's a melancholy laced with joy and expectation—more like the Portuguese
saudade.
These opposite qualities make the feeling nearly unbearably bittersweet, and also so transporting that I never want it to end. Even if I could figure out what it is I'm in longing for, I wouldn't want the desire to be satisfied, as that would kill the feeling. The feeling is sharpest when I listen to certain haunting Hindi songs, and for a while I wonder whether the melodies—like pleas themselves, like milky amber in my head—aren't producing it. Before long, though, I suspect that it's the lyrics, the words I decipher after many rewinds and with the help of Rashida, the Muslim batik artist.

"
Beloved, little by little, the separation of the night is starting to burn,
" the great playback singer Lata Mangeshkar croons in my room, till I know each word by heart, its general meaning. One of the words,
birha,
is the Rajasthani pronunciation of a word that means "separation":
viraha.
I know that much, but not the full definition, which I will find out later on.
Viraha,
the anthropologist Owen Lynch writes, translates as "love-in-separation": longing. And though it can be used in a purely romantic sense, like a lot of Hindi, it has a religious meaning, too: the near-unbearable yearning that the
gopis,
the cow maidens, felt after Krishna multiplied his body and made love to them all, then disappeared. The purest form of love, many Hindu sects believe, is incomplete love: viraha. "The frustration of the emotions' desire for immediate union with Krishna," Lynch wrote, "becomes the closest possible encounter with the divine." A transcendent longing, unable to be fulfilled, that becomes desirable in itself—this description fit, exactly, the emotion that suffused me.

The song lyrics focus my attention on viraha, but after a while I see there are reminders of it everywhere. The landscape here, cultural and physical, is shaped by this amber shade of yearning. It's apparent in architectural details on the haveli's top floor—the tiny windows intended to enforce separation, the faint outlines of what had been a hole in the floor. Mr. Singh tells me his grandfather used to pull himself up through the ceiling of the kitchen below in order to have clandestine late-night visits with his wife. Even when married, men and women were separated. This yearning is apparent in the Bollywood films, in which couples are never allowed to kiss; in the myriad words that translate roughly as "longing."
Chaahanaa:
"to want," a basic desire.
Tamannaa:
"to desire," "to long for."
Aramaan:
"desire," "longing," "heartfelt wish."
Hazrat karna:
"to long for."
Khwahish:
"longing."
Iccha:
"longing."
Viyog:
"separation."
Virasa:
"unrequited love," a situation in which there is not fire on both sides.