Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

The number of New Yorkers who can say “good morning” in any of the languages spoken by the Inuit peoples of the Arctic can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand. But in any small crowd of folk in the city or elsewhere you will surely find someone to tell you, “Eskimo has one hundred words for snow.” The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax was demolished many years ago,[91] but its place in popular wisdom about language and translation remains untouched. What are interesting for the study of translation are not so much the reasons this blooper is wrong but why people cling to it nonetheless.[92]

People who proffer the factoid seem to think it shows that the lexical resources of a language reflect the environment in which its native speakers live. As an observation about language in general, it’s a fair point to make—languages tend to have the words their users need and not to have words for things never used or encountered. But the Eskimo story actually says more than that. It tells us that a language and a culture are so closely bound together as to be one and the same thing. “Eskimo language” and “the [snowbound] world of the Eskimos” are mutually dependent things. That’s a very different proposition, and it lies at the heart of arguments about the translatability of different tongues.

The discovery and understanding of what makes different languages different and also the same has a curious modern history. In a lecture on the culture of the Hindus given in London to the Asiatic Society in 1786, an English judge posted to Bengal made a claim that overturned long-held beliefs in the superiority of the languages of the “civilized” West and the lesser jargons of the rest of the world:

The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family.[93]

This is generally reckoned to be the starter’s gun in a fascinating race that lasted for much of the nineteenth century to map all the world’s languages and to work out how they were related to one another, in “family trees” each springing from a single progenitor. But even on the Old Continent some languages—Albanian, for example—didn’t seem to have any close relatives at all, and one of them stuck out like a sore thumb. Basque, spoken in parts of northern Spain and southwestern France, was just so different as to resist any kind of “family” treatment. Wilhelm von Humboldt, elder brother of the great explorer Alexander, learned this strange idiom and wrote a grammar of it,[94] and in so doing developed the intellectual tools that in watered-down form ultimately led to the Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax.

Von Humboldt was struck not so much by the list of words that Basque has for different things as by the radically different structure of the language. It seemed to him that the grammar of Basque was the core and also the mirror of Basque culture. The observation was generalized into a theory: insofar as the formal properties of different languages are different from one another, each of the world’s languages gives access to a different mental world.[95] Basque cannot be “reduced” to French, German, or anything else. It is just itself—the embodiment and the root cause of “Basqueness.” Different languages, von Humboldt saw, were different worlds, and the great diversity of natural languages on the planet should be seen as a treasure house of tools for thinking in other ways.