Colouring the senses

Estonia’s points of difference to the rest of the world have been a running theme in this series of blogposts. One claim is that Uralic languages / cultures embody sense-switching or “synaesthesia” - eg seeing sounds or scents as colours - and other languages do not, or not to the same degree.

Of course, synaesthesia is not unique to Estonians or other Uralic peoples, although, worldwide, only 4% of people experience stimuli in this way. “A dim, purple kind of smell,” Lucy Pevensie says of an island she and her companions arrive at, in CS Lewis’s Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952). She then says of a song she hears, “It was high, almost shrill, but very beautiful. A cold kind of song, an early morning kind of song.”

As far as languages go, the meanings of words are a sort of synaesthesia that all humans experience. On seeing a rabbit at the side of the road, English speakers would automatically think “rabbit”.

Or is this an association? The word “rabbit” is associated with all things that are rabbits. Before turning to Valdur Mikita’s The Linguistic Forest (2013), let’s look at two haiku, three-line poems, of the Japanese master, Matsuo Basho (1644-1694):

Old pond / a frog jumps into / the sound of water

Pine wind / needles falling on the water’s / cool sound

The above are examples of sense-switching, which Basho used only rarely when writing haiku. The frog haiku invites the reader to feel or sense the old pond, the frog and the plop as it hits the water, at the same time, and not in sequence. The pine needles haiku inspires what Mikita calls “multi-sensory perception”, a fuller experience of wind, water and falling pine needles.

Far more common, indeed predominant for Basho, was the association of ideas (Jane Reichhold, Basho: The Complete Haiku (2008)). See below:

Already sad / now make me lonely too / mountain cuckoo

So, what is Mikita suggesting? He says Estonian and other Finno-Ugrian languages classify the world in a different way to Indo-European languages. Despite many changes in Estonian - eg widespread borrowing of words from other languages – Mikita claims there is still a “wilder peripheral consciousness” to Estonian.

“My conjecture is that our language has helped conserve and promote multi-sensory perception. While the synaesthete simply classifies the world in a different way, multi-sensory perception appears to be one of the ancient Finno-Ugrian lines of our thinking.”

In other words, there is something inherent in the Estonian language that conjures up multiple sensory responses in the reader or listener, creating a deeper or fuller connection with the world around us.

To test this idea, I had another look at the poetry of Juhan Liiv. Does the poem, At the edge of a pine forest, say more to the reader in Estonian than would my translation into English below?

Quiet, by a tall pine forest / A single little house / Quietly, snow falls through the branches

Quiet, beautiful white snow / And quiet peace / Green pines at peace / Covered in snow

At the edge of a pine forest, a small house / A poor little house / Fondly held, in mother’s lap / A small child leaves

Quiet, quiet, little prayers / Quiet, little snow / The leaver is a sufferer / Quiet, quietly

After a long echo of wind / The pines remain at peace / After a forceful struggle / A human leaves

Quietly remaining, little prayers / In falling snow / A single flake falls to the window / “Our little sister!”

There’s a lot to this poem, and a hint for the reader is that Liiv came from a poor and devout family, including sisters who died when very young. Does the Estonian resonate in a way that the English above does not? It’s difficult for me to say. One would need a lifetime of Estonian experience to have an opinion.

When I read - “Half a league, half a league, half a league onward. All in the valley of Death, rode the six hundred. ‘Forward, the Light Brigade! Charge for the guns!’ he said. Into the valley of Death, rode the six hundred.” – I feel chills down my spine. Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote his immortal poem six weeks after the 1854 disaster. His words resonate down to the present day. But that may be true only for someone who has spent a lifetime versed in English, and in English culture.

To leave the last word to Valdur Mikita who sees children as natural synaesthetes, in preferring creative modes of thought to rational ones. If humans could but retain a more childlike or ancient view of the world and life, to have a more complete appreciation of both.