How Arabic, Through Islam, Carries the Past Into the Present

In 1931, a psychologist named Winthrop Kellogg and his wife Luella did something that would now be considered ethically unthinkable. They took their ten-month-old son Donald and a seven-and-a-half-month-old female chimpanzee named Gua and raised them together as siblings for nine months. The two infants slept in adjacent cribs, ate at the same table, wore similar clothes, were tested on the same developmental milestones, and were treated by the Kelloggs in identical ways. The experiment was designed to answer a single question: how much of what we call human development is biology, and how much is environment?

The experiment was discontinued after nine months. The reason it was discontinued reversed every assumption the Kelloggs had begun with. Gua the chimpanzee did make some progress in imitating human behaviors, using a spoon, drinking from a cup, opening doors. But Donald the human child started doing something the Kelloggs had not anticipated. He started imitating Gua. Specifically, he started imitating Gua’s vocalizations rather than developing human speech. At nineteen months, when other children his age were forming sentences, Donald was making chimpanzee-like food barks. The Kelloggs ended the experiment because their son was failing to acquire language.

Language is the Mind.

For most of intellectual history, language was treated as a tool. The mind, on this view, had its thoughts, and language was the instrument by which the thoughts were communicated. You have an idea. You translate it into words. The words travel to me. I translate the words back into ideas. Language is a transparent medium between two minds that already exist.

The twentieth century dismantled this picture. The work of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1930s and 1940s proved that the language we acquire as children shapes the categories of thought available to us. A speaker of one language does not just describe the world differently from a speaker of another. He sees the world differently. He carves it up into different categories. The colors he distinguishes, the time he experiences, the moral intuitions he treats as obvious, the social distinctions he registers without thinking, all of these are shaped, before he can choose otherwise, by the language his mother spoke to him before he could speak back.