Language, culture and thought

This particular aspect of culture deserves further consideration. Few would deny that linguistic diversity characterizes the world today, especially given that Noam Chomsky's universal ‘deep structure' for all languages has been notoriously difficult to isolate.

For example, it is known that some key terms used today in Russian economics have had their own traditional equivalents in the Russian language for a long period of time, whereas other such terms are simply direct transfers of Western terms into Russian (Barnett, 1998, 2011). Thus, the Russian word for ‘market' is ‘rynok’, an indigenous term known in Russian from the beginning of the eighteenth century, whilst the Russian word for ‘macroeconomics’ is ‘makroekonomika, a simple transliteration of the English-language term of recent origin. Why this is significant is that the indigenous term ‘rynok’ originally meant simply a place of trade (e.g. a market square); it only acquired the ‘market mechanism’ connotation at a later date. Similarly, when it was pointed out to Ragnar Frisch that the term ‘econometrics’ was first used by a Ukrainian economist (Pawel Ciompa) writing in German in 1910, he responded by accepting this fact in a purely terminological sense, but he then disputed that Ciompa had meant the same thing as he did: accounting rather than economic-mathematical modelling. The meaning of special terms can be lost (and also renewed) in translation.

Perhaps more significantly, some national business histories are embedded in now-standard English economics terms, Latin being particularly well represented.

The second and more fundamental issue is whether language influences or structures thought itself, i.e. the question of examining the potential implications of linguistic differences on actual thought patterns. The ‘linguistic relativity hypothesis’, that language bounds and directly affects thought, referred to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis after its two early twentieth-century advocates, has a controversial history. Even very recently, some have provided evidence for its relevance to economics. For example, a ‘linguistic-savings hypothesis’ has been proposed, which states that how a given language expresses the future in relation to the present affects some future-oriented economic actions, e.g. savings behaviour (Chen, 2013).

Those whose first language grammatically separates the future and the present very strictly, and therefore more strongly distinguishes between future and present states, save less on average than those whose first language does not formally and linguistically distinguish between the present and the future in such a rigid fashion. Another recent study concluded that the spatial metaphors contained in specific languages (e.g. ‘time as quantity’ versus ‘time as distance’) influences how users mentally conceive of time itself (Casasanto et al., 2004). Historically it has been suggested that Semitic languages ‘tend towards shortened and abstract formulations’: for example, Arabic is particularly suited to expressing exact scientific concepts (Taton, 1963, 403).

Some may remain sceptical about such linguistic/thought pattern associations, interpreting them as the result of long-standing cultural and historical factors rather than being the inherent consequences of linguistic structures (does language precede, develop simultaneously with or follow on from culture?), but it is evident that there is an important issue to consider regarding the relation between language and economic thought.