AKMA says he disagrees with me. I beg to differ.

At issue are the comments from Ha Jin I ran approvingly:

Chinese is very rich in describing feelings. For sadness there are some words English doesn’t have. So too for taste. … [But] there are some abstract words that Chinese doesn’t have, such as ‘truth,’ ‘identity,’ and ‘solitude.’ Obviously, English is a more speculative language, whereas Chinese is more earthly, closer to things.

AKMA’s beef (well, since we’re both vegetarians, maybe we should switch to a different metaphor, perhaps something spatial) is that he has “little patience” for

the attitude that cultural groups have intellectual or spiritual tendencies that can be read off the vocabulary or syntax of their languages.

In this there are two objections AKMA may be registering: (1) Cultural groups have tendencies; (2) These tendencies are deterministically determined by their language. The “read off” implies the second objection, as if we could look at a language out of context and “read” the intellectual and spiritual tendencies of its people.

AKMA then says that he doesn’t think Ha is so dumb as to believe in #2, a simple and “tedious” linguistic determinism. But neither is experience independent of language. Rather, says AKMA, “I agree that social life, thought, and language are closely related , and that they affect one another.” But, AKMA says, he rejects what Ha says because English speakers do manage to say earthly things and Chinese speakers manage to say speculative things.

It seems to me that this objection is to a third statement that Ha doesn’t make: (3) The intellectual and spiritual tendencies language non-deterministically influences are not tendencies but hard limits. That is, AKMA seems to be taking Ha as saying that if Chinese is a more earthly language than English, then English speakers can’t say earthly things.

I find it unlikely, based on the snippet I originally posted, that Ha is saying that English can’t be earthly and Chinese can’t be speculative. He is talking about tendencies and uses the comparative “more.” So, I think AKMA is attacking a strawperson interpretation of Ha. And I thus am able to agree with AKMA’s subtantial point while disagreeing with his critique of Ha’s statement.

Now, this doesn’t answer a question that seems to jab more squarely at the questions of language and translation: Are there things that can be said in Chinese that simply cannot be said in English, and vice versa? And the answer to this question is one that I again think AKMA and I are likely to agree on: That the question is totally screwed up is betrayed by my sloppy use of the word “things.” In fact, this question is like waving red meat, um, I mean, waving a spatial metaphor in front of a postmodernist.

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