The New Yorker | How Much Does Our Language Shape Our Thinking?
紐約客| 語言對思維的影響有多大？
英文部分選自20241230期紐約客
The New Yorker | How Much Does Our Language Shape Our Thinking?
English continues to expand into diverse regions around the world. The question is whether humanity will be homogenized as a result.
英語的觸手不斷伸向世界各國，人類是否會因此同質化？
An estimated 1.5 billion people—roughly one in every five human beings—speak English, making it the most widely used language in the history of humanity. With an official status in the U.N., NATO, the W.T.O., and the E.U., it reigns as the dominant “lingua franca of the world,” Rosemary Salomone writes in “The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language” (Oxford). Like other colonial tongues, it spread first through “conquest, conversion, and commerce,” she notes, but its spread today is powered by a fourth process, what Salomone calls “collusion.” Around the globe, people pursue English and the opportunities it promises. “Korean mothers move their children to anglophone countries to learn in English,” Salomone observes. “Dutch universities teach in it. ASEAN countries collaborate in it. Political activists tweet in it.”
據估計，全球約有1/5（15億）的人講英語，這讓英語成為人類歷史上使用最廣泛的語言。羅斯瑪麗·薩洛蒙（Rosemary Salomone）在《英語的崛起：全球政治與語言的力量》（牛津大學出版社）一書中寫道，英語是聯合國、北約、世界貿易組織和歐盟的官方語言，被譽為占主導地位的“世界通用語言”。她指出，與其他殖民語言一樣，英語最初透過“征服、宗教傳播和商業”進行傳播，而如今，英語的傳播由第四種因素推動，薩洛蒙稱之為“共謀”。世界各地的人們都在學英語，尋求英語帶來的機會。薩洛蒙表示：“韓國母親把孩子送到英語國家學習英語，荷蘭的大學也用英語授課，東盟國家用英語進行合作交流，政治活動家則用英語發推文。”
The expansion of English naturally evokes angst and opposition. Salomone, a law professor at St. John’s University, focusses on the political and legal tensions that accompany the diffusion of English. France, for example, fought for decades against English’s dominance in the European Economic Community, and then in the E.U. “If, with the arrival of the English, French no longer were the first working language in the Community,” the French President Georges Pompidou warned, in 1971, “then Europe would never be totally European.” Nearly half a century later, in 2018, President Emmanuel Macron declared English to be “too dominant in Brussels” and vowed to ramp up efforts to “teach French to European officials.”
英語的盛行自然會引發憂慮和異議。作為聖約翰大學的法學教授，薩洛蒙著重探討了隨英語傳播而帶來的政治和法律領域的緊張局勢。例如，數十年來，法國一直反對英語成為歐洲經濟共同體（即後來的歐盟）的主流語言。1971 年，法國總統喬治·蓬皮杜（Georges Pompidou）曾警告：“如果英語的到來導致法語不再是歐洲共同體的第一工作語言，那麼歐洲就永遠算不上是真正的歐洲。”近半個世紀後的2018年，法國現任總統馬克龍表示，英語“在歐盟一家獨大”，並承諾要加大力度“向歐洲官員教授法語”。
In part, such apprehension reflects unease about the erosion of various cultural identities. Yet many researchers find another reason to worry about the spread of English: the prospect of cognitive hegemony. Languages, they argue, influence how we perceive and respond to the world. The idiosyncrasies of English—its grammar, its concepts, its connection to Western culture—can jointly produce an arbitrary construction of reality.
這種憂慮在一定程度上反映了人們對多元文化身份受到侵蝕而感到不安。許多研究人員發現，英語傳播引發擔憂另有緣故：可能會產生認知霸權。他們認為，語言會影響我們對世界的認知和反應。英語的語法、觀念、與西方文化的關聯等特性可能會共同構建出一種專斷的現實認知框架。
Speculation about these effects is widespread. Prasad, for instance, thinks there’s a kind of egalitarianism that’s inherent in English and missing from its Indian alternatives. “Hindi is full of caste biases,” he told me. “Idioms, phrases, sayings, jokes, songs belittle Dalits. How can any Dalit take pride in the so-called native tongue?” Other intellectuals, such as the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, maintain that English serves as yet another tool to entrench British and American culture. Pierre Bourdieu, the celebrated French sociologist, voiced a common concern when, in 2001, he wondered if “it is possible to accept the use of English without the risk of one’s mental structures being anglicized, without being brainwashed by linguistic patterns.” Was he right to worry?
關於這些影響的猜測比比皆是。例如，普拉薩德（Prasad）認為英語固有的平等主義是印地語缺失的。他告訴我說：“印地語充斥著種姓偏見。習語、短語、諺語、笑話和歌曲都貶低達利特人（Dalit）。達利特人怎麼會以所謂的母語為榮呢？” 肯亞作家恩格·瓦·蒂昂奧（Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o）等其他學者認為，英語只是鞏固英美文化的另一種工具。2001 年，法國著名社會學家皮埃爾·布林迪厄（Pierre Bourdieu）說出了一種普遍的擔憂：“是否有可能在使用英語的同時，不讓自己的思維結構被英語化、不被語言模式洗腦嗎？”他的擔憂有道理嗎？
註釋：
Dalit: 印度種姓制度中地位最低的人，在印地語中，“達利特”意為“被壓迫的人”。達利特是印度各種姓以外的、沒有權利、沒有地位的、最底層的一部分人。
Everyone can agree that language affects thought. If I told you that I have a pet badger and twenty-two canaries, you’d have new thoughts about my home life. The real question is whether a language itself has features that affect how its speakers think: Does conversing in Spanish for a month make objects seem more gendered? Does speaking English rather than Hindi make you less casteist, and maybe more capitalist?
語言會影響思維，這一點無可爭辯。要是我說，我養了一隻寵物獾和22只金絲雀，你肯定會對我的家庭生活有其他看法。真正的問題是，語言本身是否具有某種特徵，去影響使用者的思維方式呢？用西班牙語交談一個月，是否會讓人更關注物品“性”的概念？說英語而非印地語是否會讓你更少受種姓觀念影響，讓你更具資本主義思維？
註釋：
“性”的概念：西班牙語、法語、德語等大多數印歐語言中的名詞、形容詞都具有嚴格的 “性”的概念，即使是無生命的物體，也會認為規定好陰、陽或是中性。
Today, questions like these tend to be associated with Benjamin Lee Whorf, a fire-insurance analyst who studied linguistics at Yale in the nineteen-thirties. History has been both kind and unkind to him. On the one hand, his name has become synonymous with a theory about how language affects thought, though it predated him by at least a century. On the other hand, the version of the theory often attributed to him is so radical that few modern scholars would want the honor, anyway.
如今，這類問題往往和本傑明·李·沃爾夫（Benjamin Lee Whorf）聯絡在一起。沃爾夫是一位火災保險分析師，1930 年代曾在耶魯大學學習語言學。人們對他的歷史評價可謂是譭譽參半。一方面，他的名字已成為“語言影響思維”這一理論的代名詞，但實際上早在他之前至少一個世紀就出現了相關理論。另一方面，人們通常認為是他提出的理論太過激進，沒有幾個當代學者希望自己的名字和他的理論沾邊。
Whorf laid out his views in an essay titled “The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language.” Contrasting the way time is discussed by English speakers (as an object that can be quantified and divided) and by Hopi speakers (as a more continuous process, or so Whorf believed), he suggested that linguistic differences contributed to differences in how each group understands temporal flow. Despite the boldness of his claims, he was also cautious, proposing merely “traceable affinities” between language and behavior, nothing ironclad, and stressing that he was “the last to pretend that there is anything so definite as ‘a correlation.’ ”
沃爾夫在一篇題為《習慣思維和行為與語言的關係》的文章中闡述了自己的觀點。他對比了英語使用者和霍皮語使用者討論時間的方式。前者將時間視為可量化和分割的物件，而後者則認為時間是一個更加連續的過程。他認為語言的差異導致了兩個群體對時間流逝的理解不同。他的論斷很大膽，但他本人很謹慎，只是提出語言和行為之間存在“可追溯的親緣關係”，而非確鑿無疑的結論，並強調，“以後不會再有人這麼明確地提出語言和行為之間的‘相關性’了。”
Unfortunately, that nuance has usually been forgotten. Whorf has since become the mascot of linguistic determinism—the position that language is the ultimate arbiter of thought. Whorfianism, as it’s sometimes called, quickly dissolves into absurdities: if your language lacks a proper future tense, tomorrow will be inconceivable; if your language lacks certain emotion words, you will never feel them. Preverbal infants, orangutans, and all other creatures incapable of language are, by implication, powerless to perform many basic mental operations.
遺憾的是，人們往往遺忘這種細微差別，從那時起，沃爾夫就成為“語言決定論”（即語言是思想的最終仲裁者）的“代言人”。這種言論有時也被稱為“沃爾夫主義”，很快就陷入荒謬的境地：如果一種語言中缺少恰當的將來時態，那麼就無法想象明天；如果一種語言中缺少某些情感詞彙，那麼一些情緒將永遠無法感受到。照這種邏輯，不會說話的嬰兒、猩猩和所有其他不會使用語言的生物，都無法進行許多基本的心理活動。
Whorfianism has been the target of relentless discrediting. Some of the most striking counterexamples involve individuals unable to produce or comprehend language. Take the case of Brother John, a fifty-year-old French Canadian who suffered from spells of aphasia. Even during periods when he had lost the faculty of language, he mostly got along fine, according to a 1980 study published in Brain and Language. He could manipulate complex tools, follow instructions he’d been given beforehand, and sometimes succeed in hiding his impairment from others. The Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has had much to say about Whorfian fallacies. He has shown how common experiences—like searching for the right word or inventing a new term for an existing intuition—invalidate the idea that language always precedes thought. Writing in “The Language Instinct” (1994), he concludes that Whorfianism is “wrong, all wrong.”
沃爾夫主義一直是被無情詆譭的物件。最顯著的反例是那些無法使用或理解語言的人。以五十歲的法裔加拿大人約翰修士為例，他患有間歇性失語症。根據1980年發表在《大腦與語言》上的一項研究，即使在他失去語言能力的時期，他也能很好地生活。他可以使用複雜的工具，遵循事先下達的指令，有時還能成功隱瞞自己的語言障礙。哈佛大學認知科學家史蒂芬·平克（Steven Pinker）對“沃爾夫主義”的謬誤有很多看法。他透過一些常見的經驗，如尋找正確的詞語或為已有的直覺發明一個新詞彙，證明 “語言總是先於思維 ”這一觀點是錯誤的。他在1994年出版的《語言本能》一書中得出結論：沃爾夫主義是“錯誤的，大錯特錯”。
Bourdieu was right that linguistic patterns affect us. Yet, going by the best ethnographic and social-science research, his fear of brainwashing was overblown. If ways of speaking can alter ways of thinking, ways of thinking can alter ways of speaking as well. The dynamic interaction between the two is part of the ongoing story of how we try to make the world intelligible to us—and to make ourselves intelligible to one another. Talk about the human conversation.
布林迪厄說得對，語言模式會影響我們。然而，基於最佳的人種學和社會科學研究，他對洗腦的恐懼被誇大了。如果說話方式可以改變思維方式，那麼反之亦然。這兩者之間的動態互動，正是我們讓自己理解世界，並讓人類之間互相理解的一部分，這正是關於人類對話的真正內涵。
翻譯組：
Trista，女，暴富不是夢想，是未來的現實
Humi，在躺平、側臥和睡夢中尋找詩和遠方
George, the world is my oyster, 仗劍天涯 頂峰相見。
審校組：
Shulin，非上上智，無了了心
Rex，The one who widens your English~
Dossver，誰人定我去或留，定我心中的宇宙
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