Particular and general terms

Some languages are remarkably rich in words with specific meanings, while others utilize general terms and neglect unnecessary details. French is usually regarded as a highly ‘abstract’ language, whereas German is fond of ‘concrete’, particular terms. It may be noted that ‘concrete’ and ‘abstract’ are used in this context not in their usual senses, but as synonyms of ‘particular’ and ‘general’. There are various symptoms of this contrast between the two lan­guages:

1. In some cases, German has three or four specific verbs corresponding to one generic term in French: gehen, reiten, fahren — aller; siehen, silzen, liegen, hangen — etre; stellen, setzen, legen, hangen — mettre. The detailed particulars expressed by the German verbs will often remain unformulated in French, or will be indicated by the context — unless of course there is a specific need to state them, in which case they will be added as supplementary information: etre debout, aller a cheval, etc.

2. German, as we have seen, is a highly motivated language which uses prefixes lavishly to specify every aspect of the action expressed by the verb. These subsidiary shades of meaning will normally be neglected in French: setzen, ansetzen — mettre; schreiben, niederschreiben — ecrire; wachsen, heranwachsen — grandir. In English these nuances tend to be expressed by adverbial phrases: to put on, to write down, to grow up.

3. French will often use a derivative where German, and English, have a more specific compound: cendrier — ashtray, Aschenbecher [...].

4. Outside the lexical sphere proper, there are indications of the same tendency in the German adverbial and prepositional system, such as the distinction between herein and hinein, herunter, and hinunter, etc., according to the speaker’s position, and the accumulation of adverbs and prepositions to ‘trace the whole trajectory’ of an action: ‘Wir segelten vom Ufer her uber den Fluss hin nach der Insel zu. ’French and English would leave most of the details unexpressed.

If a sufficient number of languages were examined from this point of view, the relative frequency of particular and general terms might become a useful criterion in linguistic typology, even though it would be difficult to arrive at precise statistical conclusions in this field.

Closely connected with this feature is a problem which has exercised linguists and anthropologists for many years. It has often been asserted that the languages of ‘primitive’ races are rich in specific and poor in generic terms. The Tasmanian aborigines, for example, had no single word for ‘tree’, only special names for each variety of gum-tree and wattle-tree. The Zulus have no word for ‘cow’, they must specify whether they mean a ‘red cow’or a ‘white cow’, etc. Unfortunately, these reports were based only too often on inadequate evidence such as observations by early missionaries, which were uncritically accepted and reproduced by successive generations of scholars. Only as late as 1952, for example, did an American linguist explode the myth that there is no single term for ‘washing’ in Cherokee. However, the general perpetuation of such assertions mentioned above has brought discredit on the whole theory of ‘prelogical mentality’: at a symposium on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, held in Chicago in 1953, a philosopher noted that ‘everyone was apparently quite willing to talk about the primitiveness of a culture but most people were quite unwilling to talk about the primitiveness of language.’ One may wonder, however, whether there is not at least a grain of truth in the old theory. Certain facts in child psychology and in the history of our own languages seem to suggest that there is. The case of the Zulu speaker who has separate words for red and white cow is strangely similar to that of a four-year-old Dutch boy who has special terms for a cow with red spots and one with black spots; it is true that he also possessed a general word for ‘cow’ tout court, which was probably due to the influence of his mother tongue. In the same way, the alleged lack of a word for ‘tree’ in the language of Tasmanian aborigines reminds one of the history of Latin planta and its modern descendants. The Latin word meant ‘sprout, slip, cutting’. There was in Latin no generic term for ‘plant’ in the modern sense: arbor and herba were the most comprehensive class-concepts in the botanical field. According to a recent enquiry, the modern meaning of ‘plant’ is first found in Albertus Magnus in the 13th century, whereas the French plante did not acquire this wider sense until 300 years later.

It should also be borne in mind that what may seem to us a plethora of specific terms may be due not to faulty powers of abstraction but to the influence of climate and environment. Thus it is only to be expected that the Eskimo and the Lapps should require a variety of terms to distinguish between different kinds of ‘snow’. Similarly, the Paiute, a desert people, speak a language which permits the most detailed description of topographical features, a necessity in a country where complex directions may be required for the location of water holes. In the words of Edward Sapir, ‘language is a complex inventory of all the ideas, interests, and occupations that take up the attention of the community.’

In view of the great importance of the problem to linguists and anthropologists alike, it would be most desirable to organize a large-scale research project on the whole question of relations between vocabulary and culture, with special reference to the use of particular and generic terms at different levels of civilization and in different environments. Needless to say, the results of such an enquiry would be of direct relevance to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and would throw valuable light on the influence of language upon thought.