KREISLAUFKOLLAPS wasn’t a concept I had encountered until a colleague phoned to say that something unfortunate might be about to happen to her as she got out of the bath. If she didn’t appear at our 10 o’clock seminar, I was to inform the authorities immediately.
As it happens she did turn up, and we never mentioned it again. But as a rookie PhD student in a small town in southern Germany – in physics, not linguistics, medicine or anthropology – the incident perplexed me. From then on, Kreislaufkollaps seemed to be everywhere. Celebrities, acquaintances, the landlord of the pub downstairs – all succumbed. By general consent, it was a serious malady. The only sure remedy was several days of bed rest.
“Circulatory collapse”, said the dictionary. But this condition was equally foreign to me. Only gradually did it dawn on me that this was not a bug, but a feature of my adopted home. To good beer, excellent sausages and peerless engineering, add terrible hypochondria. This only exposed a deeper question. Had the German language expanded to accommodate ? Or did these conditions only exist thanks to its peerless ability to fashion words such as ąó°ůĂĽłóÂᲹłó°ů˛őłľĂĽ»ĺľ±˛µ°ě±đľ±łŮ – the feeling of ennui that colours the dark, early months of the northern European year?
Advertisement
Such questions are, like many in linguistics, mired in controversy. “The official party line is that you invent and develop words as tools,” says , a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin and author of The Secret Life of Pronouns: What our words say about us. “If you need them, you will create and use them.” But there is another school of thought: “Language might dictate perception and behaviour,” he says.
Take that hoary old chestnut of how many words for snow there are in the Eskimo-Aleut languages. The precise number is bogged down in arguments about how to define a word, but it’s quite a few. That might be because people saw many types of snow around them and invented words to describe them – but it could also be the reverse. “You have many words for snow, therefore you are able to perceive snow better,” says Pennebaker.
“Once you have a word for an emotion, it flourishes – people feel it more”
Fittingly, German speakers pioneered the idea that we are shaped by the language we speak. Wilhelm von Humboldt, a Prussian linguist, philosopher and diplomat, and elder brother of the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, argued that language creates a nation’s spirit. The 20th-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger went so far as to write that “man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man”.
Certainly, medical conditions that seem at least partly linguistically based aren’t just a Teutonic phenomenon. The circulatory condition jambes lourdes, or “heavy legs”, is unknown outside France. Only an Italian who ventures out inadequately clothed risks the full consequences of a colpo d’aria – “hit of air” – to spine, head or stomach.
Effects can be more subtle. Some languages seem to influence how their speakers think about things like space, time and even emotions, says Tiffany Watt-Smith, who researches the history of emotions at Queen Mary University of London. “The thing I find most compelling is the argument that certain cultures will name an emotion because it’s more acceptable and valid, and once you name it you notice it more often,” she says. “The emotion flourishes: people feel it more because they have a word for it.”
A good example is the Japanese word amae – something like the comfort of knowing you can depend on another’s support. The word might have emerged from an expressive need in Japan’s collectivist culture, but once in existence it might also have allowed that aspect of culture to flourish.
I can relate to this chicken-and-egg explanation. One of the most emotional moments of my brief and undistinguished academic career in Germany was when, after five years of working together, my professor scheduled a meeting in which the main agenda point turned out to be offering me the opportunity to address him with the informal form of you, du. The most proximate cause of this strange formality between close colleagues was clearly the language that created the distinction in the first place – manners making the man. But it might not be that simple, says Pennebaker. “The thing is, lots of European languages have that distinction between formal and informal, but I don’t know of any besides German that has that sort of formal graduation ceremony,” he says. “Language reflects psychological state, rather than driving it.” Man maketh the manners, in other words.
The digital age, with its huge databases of everyday communication, might offer new opportunities to tease out the interplay between language and speaker across nations. Earlier this year, a team led by Peter Sheridan Dodds at the University of Vermont in Burlington published a study in which people rated the happiness of the most commonly appearing words in 10 languages in Google web crawls and searches, tweets and databases of music lyrics (). Spanish speakers rated their words as sunniest. The Chinese and Russians were gloomiest, and Germans were middling. English speakers rated their words as generally positive (except, oddly, when confronted with lyrics to music). Perhaps that conforms to national stereotypes – with the huge caveats that languages such as English and Spanish aren’t the preserve of one nation, and national stereotypes are, well, stereotypes. But the question remains open: is the mood making the language, or the language making the mood?
Positively speaking
Keith Chen, now at the University of California, Los Angeles, is someone whose work seems to come down on one side of the argument. He looked at behaviours – smoking, exercising, condom use and financial saving – among speakers of languages that distinguish events in the future using distinctive tense markers (such as English, “It will rain tomorrow”) compared with those that don’t (ones such as German that just use the present tense, “It rains tomorrow”). He found that speakers of languages that don’t make a distinction were more likely to act in ways that would improve their future well-being, such as not smoking. – although he admits he can’t discount the possibility that languages have evolved to reflect existing behaviours.
Either way, I can’t help thinking that the German language imbues some reality to those uniquely German illnesses. They are certainly catching. After moving back to the UK, my low blood sugar levels – Blutzuckerwerte, a prelude to circulatory collapse – seemed real enough, even though for my compatriots I might as well have been translating from double Dutch.
Eventually, though, I regained my anglophone constitution. I’ve finally worked out the English for Kreislaufkollaps, too. It’s “having a funny turn” – and the most effective remedy here is a nice cup of tea, a sit down, and possibly a biscuit.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Ill communication”
