There’s a weird stage after finishing the first real draft of a book where my mind is just… empty. I may want to dream and scheme about a new book, or a sequel, or the plot writeups I need to submit for the next LARP event I’m staffing.
But there’s nothing. I even find it hard to read fiction. It’s as if the feelers of my brain have all been worn away, and my thoughts just slide around unable to latch onto anything. I can’t even come up with a better metaphor than worn-out brain-tentacles (ew).
Fortunately I know from experience that it goes away. The trickle of creative juice will eventually fill me back up. And in the meantime I just poke around at stuff, collecting the shiny bits, trying to tempt my brain back into action.
One of the recent shiny bits was an episode of the fabulous podcast Radiolab called Lost & Found. The whole episode is excellent, but the part I’m going to talk about here is a short segment that starts at around 32:25
In it, there’s a discussion of the language of the Pormpuraaw, an indigenous Australian people, which relies on cardinal directions (north/south/east/west) rather than left/right. Even the standard greeting is affected by this, such that you don’t say “How are you?” but rather “Where are you going?”
And if you’re local you can answer that, because you’ve been trained all your life to think in those terms. You can answer that you’re going south-southwest. Or that the salt is in the northwest corner of the cupboard. The academic being interviewed in the podcast describes that she herself began to develop a sort of new “console” in her mind that gave her a birds-eye view of her own position, after spending significant time in the community.
Neat, huh?
But there’s more. Googling for more information on the Pormpuraaw led me to this article in the Wall Street Journal.
The entire article is full of really interesting stuff. But here’s a bit I found particularly fascinating:
Differences in how people think about space don’t end there. People rely on their spatial knowledge to build many other more complex or abstract representations including time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality and emotions. So if Pormpuraawans think differently about space, do they also think differently about other things, like time?
To find out, my colleague Alice Gaby and I traveled to Australia and gave Pormpuraawans sets of pictures that showed temporal progressions (for example, pictures of a man at different ages, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. When asked to do this, English speakers arrange time from left to right. Hebrew speakers do it from right to left (because Hebrew is written from right to left).
Pormpuraawans, we found, arranged time from east to west. That is, seated facing south, time went left to right. When facing north, right to left. When facing east, toward the body, and so on. Of course, we never told any of our participants which direction they faced. The Pormpuraawans not only knew that already, but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time. And many other ways to organize time exist in the world’s languages. In Mandarin, the future can be below and the past above. In Aymara, spoken in South America, the future is behind and the past in front.
Especially as a writer, I think it is utterly fascinating that language can so profoundly affect the way we see things in the world around us. And it makes me wish I were fluent in another language (I have only a halting familiarity with Spanish that I use now days only to try to puzzle out the lyrics of the songs from my Zumba class). It would be very cool to be able to read a beloved book in another language. I have even more respect for translators now!
Have any of you read a book in two different languages? What was it like?
