In a previous post,
I discussed the opinions that we like to entertain about people(s),
on the strength of our judgements about their linguistic habits.
Among those habits, accents rank high: research findings make it
clear that we assign intellectual and personal accomplishments (or
lack thereof) to fellow human beings, on the basis solely of their
accent.
But we appear to have similar difficulties refraining from passing
judgement on people’s overall brain functions on the strength of
overall features of their speech.
Despite our next-to-nil understanding
of how thought and language(s)
may interconnect, the conviction that they correlate has a long
history. Among Western thought, one famous attempt at extricating
thought from uses of language dates from the 17th century,
when the English philosopher John Wilkins published An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language.
In it, Wilkins sets out to propose a “natural grammar” which, he
clarifies, “may likewise be stiled Philosophical, Rational, and
Universal” (p. 297), in that it should reflect the workings of the
human mind, devoid of language-bound intrusions. This natural grammar
should also constitute an improvement on the universal grammars
created by his predecessors, who “were so far prejudiced by the common Theory of the
languages they were acquainted with, that they did not sufficiently
abstract their rules according to Nature” (pp. 297-298), and thereby mistook properties of the
language(s) that they were familiar with for universal properties of language – an
observation which applies as acutely to more recent creators of
universal grammars. Incidentally, for some discussion of whether
“Nature” might be interpretable through “a theory of
everything” consecrated in a single, “special” language, see my
review of Roy
Harris’s book The Semantics of Science.
The contention behind Wilkins-inspired
endeavours is that our thoughts may be beyond our immediate grasp
because of meddling languages, but are nevertheless there and can
therefore be retrieved as “pure” thoughts, as it were. That is,
thought is one thing, languages are another. In contrast, popular
views about language(s) and thought assume not only that thinking and
speaking/signing mirror one another, but that the former can be
inferred from the latter, in yet another example of the fallacy which
equates (presumed) correlation with causality.
That is, we turn the thinking-in-a-language conviction on its head,
to conclude that thinking in tongues means speaking in thoughts.
Samuel Johnson attributed this kind of reasoning to the ingestion of
intoxicants, when he quipped that “One of the disadvantages of wine
is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts”, but sober
thinkers appear to reason likewise.
The conviction that the uses of our
languages bear witness to the uses of our grey matter surfaces, for
example, in the way much language teaching deals with adult learners.
The misperception that learners’ budding abilities in someone
else’s native language
reflect overall intellectual ability may well have originated from
language teachers’ inability to interact with their students but
through the language that they’re teaching. Child learners fare no
better: young learners of mainstream/school languages go on being
referred to “special” care,
on the misunderstanding that academic underachievement reflects disorder rather than simple lack of practice of (new) academic uses
of a new language – or a new language variety.
Children who are so referred to
specialist care often see the reason for their referral snowballing
into a clinical “condition”, rather than dismissed as unfounded.
This is because specialists also speak (and think?) in tongues,
and may not be aware of two things: one, that the child is learning
the mainstream and/or school language, which often doubles as the
language of intervention, under circumstances which do not and cannot
match monolingual linguistic and cognitive milestones; and the other,
that the child cannot therefore satisfy the demands of monolingual assessment instruments
in that language. Inferring intellectual abilities from abilities in
languages that we’re only just beginning to make sense of, whether
we’re young or old, is unfair. If people do indeed think in
languages, then multilinguals do not think in a single language.
The next couple of posts will deal with
a few more monolingual-bound misconceptions about being multilingual.
© MCF 2013
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