Digital Sprocket

How do we trace the spread of ideas around the world? With hard technologies this is relatively straightforward. If you find a bronze mirror in a tomb from 200 BC, then you can be certain they had access to bronze mirrors in that location at that time. What about more abstract concepts like time? Linguistics may point to a method for tracking some of these concepts. For what follows I must acknowledge Professor John McWhorter and his lecture series, “Understanding Linguistics: The Science of Language.”

It has been demonstrated that there is link between the way we speak and the way we think in a several particular examples. I’m not talking about the classic Sapir-Worf hypothesis that grammar and vocabulary channel thought in a fairly gross way. Rather the Neo-Worfians have demonstrated less striking but more concrete links between some concepts and language. The two specific examples I know about are representations of time, and the gender of nouns.

To my knowledge the Neo-Worfians have not proven the causal link between the two. It could be that the thought processes dictate language development, or that the language dictates the thought process. They have, however, proven that there is a strong link between the two. For example, in English we have a tendency to talk about time in terms of length, as if you could measure it on a ruler. Spanish speakers, are more likely use terms of volume as if you could fill up a jar with time.

Daniel Cassanto conducted a series of experiments where he showed subjects a lengthening line or a jar filling with water as representations time measurements. The English speakers were much better at estimating the duration when using the line than the jar. The opposite held true for the Spanish speakers. Cassanto went on to confirm that this also holds true for Greek speakers who use length for time as well.

Our language clearly indicates how we think about this very abstract concept of measuring time. It is a theory that is easily testable for any language in the world, and I’m confident we will see it hold true in almost every case. Of course, we will probably find languages that use other methods for describing time, but that will only make the research richer.

Now, all of that was just background so we can get to the meat of this. A survey of the worlds languages can then be used to create a map of time measurement language, and therefore of thought. Who knows what patterns this exercise will reveal. More interestingly, this could be the start of discovering how these two (or more) concepts spread around the world.

Historical linguistics provides many tools for analyzing and reconstructing elements from our linguistic past, and even from dead languages. These could start to create a map of the movement of this idea through time. Thus leading us on the path to tracking down their origins in both time and space.

If this search yields an origin for these time concepts, and creates a distribution, then it will be valuable to research other words with a positive link between language and thought. What else could we look into? Perhaps the language of harvesting, or moving a boat, or anything we do that is more of a technique than a physical tool. For example, we pick fruit, and mow hay. Do our words indicate where we got these ideas from or how we think about the process? I don’t know, but the research tools exist. All we need to do is reach out and grab them.