The Compass in Your Mouth: A First Glimpse at Language and Thought

The humidity in the eastern highlands of Papua New Guinea clings to your skin like a second layer of clothing, heavy with the rot of decaying leaf litter and the sweet, heady scent of wild ginger. It is August 2018, and I have spent three days hiking up muddy slopes to reach the small Tainae settlement of Kone, home to roughly 300 people who speak a language known to fewer than 2,000 outsiders in the entire world. I am here to document oral creation myths, a project I had pitched to my university’s anthropology department six months prior, armed with a notebook, a digital recorder, and a local translator named Joseph, a 22-year-old university student who grew up in the village but speaks Tok Pisin, English, and a little Tainae fluently.

My contact in the village is Mambu, a 78-year-old elder and the tribe’s designated storyteller, his teeth stained black from decades of chewing betel nut, his skin mapped with the clan’s traditional mud-syrup tattoos that mark him as the keeper of the community’s origin stories. We sit on woven mats outside his thatch-roofed hut as the sun dips below the ridge, painting the sky in streaks of tangerine and purple, and he begins to speak in a low, rhythmic cadence, his hands carving shapes in the air as he talks. Joseph translates as he goes: “At the beginning, there was only darkness, and no earth, no sky, no light. A great spider named Täne wove a web from the vines of the sky tree, and he pulled the earth up from the bottom of the dark water, and wove it onto the web, so that the earth hangs above the sky, held by the vines.”

I scribble the translation down in my notebook, satisfied, until Mambu stops suddenly and laughs, a deep, rumbling sound that makes the other villagers gathered around us chuckle too. Joseph looks embarrassed, and leans over to whisper, “I translated it wrong. He says the earth is under the web, not above.” I frown, confused. Mambu holds up a hand to stop me from speaking, and gestures to the sky above us, then to the ground at our feet. “The spider is up there,” he says, pointing to the sky, “and the earth is down here, under his web. The web holds the sky up, not the earth.” Joseph translates again, and this time the words land differently: “The earth is under the spider’s web, and the web holds the sky above it.”

I spent the next hour arguing with Joseph, convinced he had misunderstood the elder. In English, “under” means below, “above” means on top: if the earth is under the web, then the web must be above the earth, holding the earth up, not the sky. But Mambu kept shaking his head, and after 20 minutes of back and forth, Joseph finally explained the problem: Tainae has no absolute words for “up” and “down.” All spatial references are relative to the speaker’s position, or the position of the subject being described. When Mambu said the earth was “under” the web, he was speaking from the spider’s perspective: the spider is on the web, so the earth is below (under) the web from where the spider sits. When he said the web holds the sky up, he was speaking from a human perspective: we are on the earth, so the sky is above us, held up by the web that is between us and the sky. The entire myth, which I had thought I understood perfectly, was built on a spatial logic that had no equivalent in English, and my translation had flipped the entire cosmology of the story on its head.

That failed translation changed the trajectory of my career. I had gone to Papua New Guinea to document stories, but I left with a question that has haunted me for the past five years, the question that forms the backbone of this book: Does the language we speak shape the way we think?

For most of my life, I had taken language for granted, the way most people do. I assumed that words were just labels we attach to pre-existing ideas, that “cat” in English, “gato” in Spanish, and “neko” in Japanese all refer to the same fuzzy, four-legged creature, and that the only difference between languages is the sounds we use to say those labels. I thought that thought was universal, and language was just a neutral tool we used to share those thoughts with other people. But that afternoon in the highlands of Papua New Guinea made it clear that this assumption was wrong. The Tainae language didn’t just have different words for “up” and “down” – it had an entirely different way of encoding space, of locating objects in relation to each other and to the speaker, and that encoding shaped the entire way Mambu told his creation story, the way he understood the structure of the universe, and the way he saw his place in it.

You have probably encountered small, everyday examples of this yourself, even if you didn’t think to connect them to the structure of your language. If you are an English speaker, you almost certainly describe time as a horizontal line: you talk about looking forward to the future, looking back on the past, pushing deadlines back, and moving meetings forward. You might even gesture horizontally when you talk about time, sweeping your hand from left to right when you talk about the future, and right to left when you talk about the past. But if you speak Mandarin, you might also use vertical metaphors for time: you talk about shàng gè yuè (上个月, “up month”) for last month, and xià gè yuè (下个月, “down month”) for next month, and you might gesture upward when you talk about the past, and downward when you talk about the future. These aren’t just random quirks of language: research shows that these metaphors are embedded in the way speakers of different languages think about time, even when they are not actively using language.

In the early 2000s, cognitive psychologist Lera Boroditsky, now at Stanford University, ran a now-famous experiment to test this. She recruited native speakers of English, Mandarin, and a number of other languages, and asked them to arrange a set of cards printed with time-related words (yesterday, today, tomorrow, last week, next week) in chronological order. English speakers almost always arranged the cards from left to right, matching the horizontal, left-to-right structure of written English. Hebrew speakers, whose language is written right to left, almost always arranged the cards from right to left. Mandarin speakers were more mixed: most arranged the cards left to right, matching the modern left-to-right writing system of Mandarin, but a significant minority arranged them vertically, placing earlier times higher on the table and later times lower, matching the vertical “up/down” metaphors common in spoken Mandarin. When Boroditsky ran the same experiment again, this time asking participants to press a button as quickly as possible when they saw a time word that fit a specific sequence (for example, “the day after tomorrow”), she found that Mandarin speakers were faster to respond when the words were arranged vertically, while English speakers were faster when they were arranged horizontally. The metaphors baked into our language didn’t just affect how we talked about time – they changed the way our brains processed time-related information, even when we weren’t using language at all.[^1]

This is the core mystery this book set out to explore: the relationship between the language we speak, and the mind we think with. For most of the 20th century, this question was the domain of a controversial, often misunderstood hypothesis called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, named after the American linguist Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf. The hypothesis is often summarized in its extreme “strong” form as “language determines thought”: the idea that if your language has no word for a particular concept, you cannot even think that concept. This extreme version of the hypothesis has been repeatedly debunked: we can all think about concepts that don’t have a single word in our language, from the taste of a new fruit to the feeling of falling in love, and translation between languages is not