Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (22 page)

Different ways of cutting up the world are far from being exceptional picture-postcard rarities. In order to unearth good examples of the phenomenon, one certainly doesn’t need to resort to pairs of languages that are spoken halfway around the world from each other. We can find plenty of them right under our nose, simply by poking about a bit in the languages that are closest to our native tongue, even limiting our search to words and concepts that are unquestionably central.

Thus, nothing seems more obvious to us anglophones than what
time
is. We know
what time it is
right now, we know
how much time
it will take to drive to the airport, and
how many times
we’ve done so before. These three ideas strike us as being very clearly all about just one central, monolithic, and hugely important concept: the concept known as “time” (in fact, the most frequent noun in the English language). And yet, most
strangely, there are languages that don’t see those three ideas as being about the same concept at all! If you’re a francophone, you know what
heure
it is right now, you know how much
temps
it will take to drive to the airport, and how many
fois
you’ve done so before. They aren’t the same word or even related words, and the three concepts labeled by the words “heure”, “temps”, and “fois” seem quite distant from each other for French speakers. As if this weren’t bad enough, the French word “temps” doesn’t denote only a certain subvariety of English’s concept of
time
— in addition, a good fraction of the time, it means “weather”. Thus speakers of French, in their whimsical fashion, somehow manage to confuse the weather and the time! On the other hand, we speakers of English manage to mix up the hour of the day with the number of occasions on which something has happened! Which mistake is sillier?

The English and French languages certainly don’t agree on how the world should be broken up into categories, even for the nouns of the highest frequency that exist, let alone for categories labeled by verbs, adverbs, prepositions, and so forth. For example, those incorrigible French speakers, they irrationally distinguish between two kinds of “in” — namely, “dans” and “en”. What could make less sense than that? Whereas we clear-sighted English speakers, we distinguish (most rationally, of course) between two kinds of “de” — namely, “of” and “from”. What could make more sense than this?

These kinds of discrepancies are totally typical of how different languages carve the world up differently from each other, and between any given pair of languages there are myriads of such discrepancies. How, then, do people ever communicate at all across language boundaries?

To help answer this question, we would like to offer a simple visual metaphor for thinking about the words of a language (and more generally about lexical expressions) and the concepts that they represent. We begin by suggesting that you imagine a two-dimensional space or a three-dimensional one, as you prefer; next, we are going to start filling that space up, in our imagination, with small patches of color, using a different color for each different language that we are interested in — say green for French, red for English, blue for German, purple for Chinese, and so forth. It is tempting to think of these concept-blobs as something like rocks or jelly beans — odd little shapes having very well-defined edges or boundaries. The truth is far from that, however. While each blob is intensely colored in its center (deep red, deep green, whatever), as one approaches its “boundaries” (which in truth don’t exist), it grows lighter in shade — think of pink or chartreuse — and then it simply fades out, passing through lighter and lighter pastel shades as it does so. This image of blobs with hazy contours of course echoes our metaphor likening concepts to very dense cities that gradually turn into suburbs and then fade into countryside.

We will call the space itself, before the insertion of any colored blobs (somewhat like a house without furniture), a “conceptual space” (there are many such, which explains the indefinite article). At the very center of each conceptual space are found the most
common kinds of concepts — those for very common tangible objects, intangible ideas, phenomena, properties, and so forth — the concepts whose instances are encountered all the time by people who belong to a particular culture (or subculture) and era, and which those people must be able to categorize quickly and effortlessly in order to survive, or simply to live.

The core items in a typical conceptual space include, quite obviously, the concepts for various entities such as the main parts of the human body; general classes of common animals, such as
bird, fish, insect
, and a few farm animals; general classes of plants, such as
tree, bush
, and
flower
; things to eat and drink; common feelings, such as being
cold
or
hot
or
hungry
or
thirsty
or
sleepy
or
happy
or
sad
; common actions, such as
walking
and
sleeping
and
eating
and
giving
and
taking
and
liking
and
disliking
; common properties, such as
big
and
small, near
and far,
kind
and
cruel, edible
and
inedible
; common relationships, such as
belonging to
, being
inside
or
outside
, being
above
or
below
, being
before
or
after
; common degrees, such as
not at all, not much, slightly, medium, very much, totally —
and so forth. Every language has words for such notions, because all humans require these concepts in order to live. This list merely scratches the surface of the core of a typical conceptual space, of course, but it gives the general idea. In any case, these concepts, all residing at or very close to the dead center of a typical conceptual space, are quasi-universals that most humans deal with constantly, and they are thus bases that are well covered, and necessarily so, by every language.

The idea of conceptual spaces will help to make more tangible and concrete some ideas about the words and expressions of a given language and the concepts used by its speakers. One of the most important ideas that it helps one to think about is how different languages cover, or fail to cover, certain concepts. Between the conceptual spaces of distant cultures there will be large discrepancies. But what about cultures that are bound together by geography, history, traditions, and so forth? In such cases, the conceptual spaces will be very close to each other.

In what follows, we will focus mostly on contemporary Western cultures, simply because we ourselves feel more competent in that context, and we assume that many of our readers (at least those who are reading this book in one of its two original languages) would also feel more comfortable that way. However, our general points have nothing to do with the specific concepts that we will discuss.

How is a conceptual space filled up with sets of blobs of different colors? For instance, how do the repertoires of concepts possessed by French and English speakers who share essentially the same culture compare?

According to our visual metaphor, regions near the very center of a conceptual space are densely filled in, no matter what language we are speaking about. If, as suggested above, French is represented by green, then there is a green blob near the middle of conceptual space that covers the area occupied by the concept
hand.
And if English is represented by red, then fairly much the same area is covered by a red blob
of similar size and shape to the green (French) blob. Each different language will cover that same area of a conceptual space fairly well, so there will be blobs of many different colors right there, all closely overlapping with one other.

Some of the different-colored blobs representing different languages’ coverages of a given extremely frequent concept will tend to have pretty much the same shape, but in the case of other blobs there will be discrepancies, some minor and some major. We’ve already seen a pretty major one, involving
time
corresponding to
heure, temps
, and
fois
, and
temps
corresponding to both
time
and
weather.
To provide another case, the red blob representing the extremely frequent concept expressed by the word “big” in English aligns quite well with the green blob for the French word “grand”, but by no means perfectly so, since some of the meanings expressed by our “big” are usurped by French’s “gros” (for instance, things that are large in thickness or width, as opposed to those that are large in height), and conversely, our word “great” usurps some of the meanings expressed by French’s “grand” (those that mean “highly accomplished, world-famous, and deeply influential”).

Some even more severe misalignments involve extremely frequent prepositions such as “in” (which in fact is covered in French not just by “dans” and “en”, but by many other prepositions, depending on the context), and by similarly frequent and enormously protean verbs such as “to get” (which sometimes is best rendered by “obtenir”, other times by “prendre”, other times by “chercher”, other times by “recevoir”, other times by “comprendre”, other times by “devenir”, other times by “procurer”, and on and on). Of course, the story is symmetric; that is, each of the just-mentioned high-frequency French prepositions and verbs is likewise covered by all sorts of different English verbs, depending on the context. There’s no clean one-to-one alignment between blobs of different colors, although there’s a great deal of overlap.

On the other hand (and quite luckily!), for a very large number of truly important concepts — say,
finger, water, flower, smile, weight, jump, drop, think, sad, cloudy, tired, without, above, despite, never, here, slowly, and, but
, and
because
, to give just a few examples — there is generally quite good agreement between French and English, and, for that matter, among all the languages that we are familiar with.

Thus, the center of this conceptual space is inhabited by red and green blobs that often coincide quite well, and when they don’t coincide, then there are all sorts of overlapping blobs, each with its own curious shape. Luckily, though, despite the fact that the green blobs covering a certain concept and the red blobs covering the same concept are often shaped rather differently, the central zone of the overlapping space is extremely densely covered both by red blobs and by green blobs (and also, if we want to throw in other languages, blue blobs and purple blobs, and so forth).

Furthermore, there aren’t going to be any gaping holes in the linguistic coverage of concepts residing near the dead center of the conceptual space of some other culture (such as the Nepali or the Navajo culture); there won’t be blank zones where a human language totally lacks a lexical item labeling a concept that is universally part of the human condition. Any language spoken by more than a tiny, isolated group will easily be able to talk about, for instance, sleeping poorly, or seeing a friend after a long time,
or breaking a stick, or throwing a stone, or walking uphill, or feeling sweaty, or being very tired, or losing one’s hair, though each one will have a unique way of doing so.

Let us now imagine moving outwards from the core towards slightly less frequently encountered concepts, such as, for instance
thanks, barn, fog, purple, sincere, garden, sand, star, embarrassing, roof
, and
although.
If these concepts are of comparable importance to one another within the culture, then their distance from the center will be about the same, and we can say that they constitute a ring (or a shell, if you are envisioning a three-dimensional space). These concepts are still important in the conceptual space — and so, once again, we expect that this region of conceptual space, though not belonging to the most central core, will still be quite densely filled with blobs of every color. On the other hand, let’s zoom outwards a considerable distance further from the core of our conceptual space, to a different shell where we will encounter (let us say) the concepts
frowning, cantering, fingernail-biting, tap-dancing, welcome home, income tax, punch line, corny joke, sappy movie, vegetarian, backstroke, chief executive officer, wishful thinking, sexual discrimination, summit meeting
, and
adverb
(just to give a tiny sampling of the hypothetical shell). This latest outward leap has clearly carried us into more rarefied territory, and so we would not expect all the cultures of the world (and of all different historical epochs) to share all the concepts in this shell, nor would we expect all the earth’s languages to have words or phrases to denote all the concepts in this shell.

Let’s take any shell of this conceptual space. Since languages differ enormously, we can easily find a red blob that no single green blob covers precisely. However, a small
set
of green blobs will collectively do a pretty good job of covering all the territory of the red blob (although they will inevitably also cover areas outside the red blob). And of course, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, meaning that we can easily find green blobs that no single red blob covers precisely.

To make things concrete, let’s take an example. English speakers fluently and effortlessly use the word “pattern” to describe regularities, exact or approximate, that they perceive in the world. However, if they wish to talk about such phenomena in French, they will soon learn, to their frustration, that there is no French word that exactly covers this very clear zone of conceptual space. And thus, depending on details of what they mean, they will have to choose among French words such as “motif”, “régularité”, “structure”, “système”, “style”, “tendance”, “habitude”, “configuration”, “disposition”, “périodicité”, “dessin”, “modèle”, “schéma”, and perhaps others.