indessed roscivs

I know, I know … all I ever write about these days are me and my braces. “What a boring blog, roscivs,” I can hear you all say. “Where are the endless discussions of the nuances of copyright? Where are the random riffs on economics? Where are the random yet interesting youtube videos?”

Well, those things have taken a back seat in my life to braces. (But fear not, interesting linguistical tidbits will be found in this braces-related post nonetheless.) Fortunately, not everything in my life has been replaced by a fixation on braces. In fact, my eating habits have nearly returned to normal. This last week I started eating english muffins again, and yesterday I even ate a hamburger! Carefully, I admit, and with no bacon or pickles, but I successfully chewed through a hamburger and fries with no pain or discomfort whatsoever. Normality ensues!

In my Japanese conversation exchange last week, I learned all sorts of braces-related words, like “teeth”, “braces”, “dentist”, “orthodontist”—and a very interesting Japanese word, “歯軋り”, or ha-gi-shi-ri. It means, according to my dictionary, “involuntary nocturnal tooth grinding”.

My conversation partner asked me to explain why I got braces. In English, the explanation is a little lengthy. “Well, my teeth interfere with each other, and so I grind my teeth at night, which causes problems, so I figured if I got my teeth straightened out it would help with that.”

In Japanese, the sentence is basically, “ha-gi-shi-ri-de-su”. Because of involuntary nocturnal tooth grinding. How convenient! The Japanese have a word for it indeed!

Shades of Sapir-Whorf, eh? Does language alter the way we think? Are Japanese people more easily able to express these sorts of concepts because of the way their language is shaped?

As I’ve discussed many times, I think the causal chain is reversed—it is because the Japanese more often discuss these sorts of concepts that they’ve shaped their language in such a way that makes it easy. (My conversation partner hypothesized that this is because Americans are able to release their stress in ways other than gnashing of the teeth, whereas the Japanese tend to keep their stress bottled up inside. I can’t speak to the accuracy of this theory, but it seems interesting.)

In support of the “culture-shapes-language, not vice-versa” argument, I present to you the word bruxism. If I’m not mistaken, it is a word nearly identical in meaning to 歯軋り. So, in theory, my English explanation could be just as succint as my Japanese explanation. Why did you get braces? “Oh, because of bruxism.”

But most people wouldn’t understand what I was saying. They either wouldn’t recognize the word, or wouldn’t recognize the further context that such a statement implied (e.g. the other medical problems that such a condition causes). Why is that? Why would a Japanese person understand a wealth of information behind the word 歯軋り, but not an American with bruxism? It’s not because there’s something lacking in the language. The word is there, ready to be used. The difference is in the culture, in how often the word is used, and in what contexts the word is used. If suddenly it became an important concept culturally, the English language would be fully “prepared to do its work” in conveying those ideas clearly and succinctly.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 18th, 2008 at 11:49 pm and is filed under language, braces. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.