The Economist - USA (2020-10-17)

The EconomistOctober 17th 2020 Books & arts 73

2 for imperialist chauvinism and an oppor-
tunity for pillage. As a popular Cairo saying
put it: “The riches of Egypt are for the for-
eigners therein.” European explorers bat-
tled for access to the best sites, nursing
nasty personal rivalries, ingratiating them-
selves with Egyptian rulers and smuggling
booty away to museums at home (one en-
terprising Englishman extracted his trea-
sure from a guarded storeroom by tunnel).
Unable to carry the Great Pyramid of Giza
back to Berlin, a group of Prussians did the
next best thing, singing their royal hymn in
the burial chamber and scrawling a hiero-

glyphic ode to their king. Archaeology was

not a science, commented a later writer—it

was a vendetta.

But “A World Beneath the Sands” is more

than a saga of foreigners in the desert—it

also follows Egypt on its rocky path to the

20th century. Mr Wilkinson vividly evokes

the slave markets and Bedouin attacks of

the early 1800s and, later, tourist hotels and

the Suez Canal (opened in 1869). New

nationalist ideas were sometimes ad-

vanced by the same outsiders who hoarded

Egyptian artefacts. So desperate was a

French Egyptologist to keep German and

British influence out of the Egyptian Muse-

um, for example, that he hired locals for se-

nior jobs instead, incidentally champion-

ing their advancement.

By the 1920s Egyptian officials were can-

celling foreign excavation permits. Espe-

cially after the nationalist revolution three

decades later, archaeology in the country

was controlled by the locals. That was just

and probably inevitable—yet for all their

flaws, the foreigners achieved a lot. They

liberated ancient Egypt from legend, prov-

ing it “every bit as innovative and sophisti-

cated” as Greece and Rome. 7

Johnson Wine and bottles

The fruity lexicon of wine suggests the links between language and understanding

“O

ak” and“fruit forward” are for

wine amateurs. “Cedar” and “barn-

yard” are for real connoisseurs, and only

a professional would have the confi-

dence to deploy “gravel” or “tennis balls”.

One tasting note says a wine has hints of

“mélisse, lemon-balm”. If you are won-

dering what “mélisse” is, don’t bother: it

is actually just French for “lemon-balm”.

The language of wine is easy to mock.

It can be recondite, even downright

obscure. Oenophiles make a convenient

subject for ridicule: if their cellars re-

quire such a wide-ranging lexicon, they

are probably rich enough to cope with it.

But wine vocabulary has its uses. Among

the vast array of tastes, perhaps even

flowery labels help experts pinpoint

odours and flavours that they are inter-

ested in and want to remember. If you

have a name for something, it may be

easier to keep it in your head.

Perhaps. You might have heard the

stereotyping joke about women having

hundreds of words for colour in their

vocabularies because they love to shop,

but men having just the eight that come

in a child’s crayon box. This is a car-

icatured and simplified version of Lud-

wig Wittgenstein’s view that “the limits

of my language mean the limits of my

world.” The underlying argument is that

having a name for something lets you

understand it. But researchers have

found that the links between perception,

cognition and language turn out to be

more complicated than that.

The debate over the relationship

between thought and language is one of

the most heated in psychology and lin-

guistics. In one corner is the “Sapir-

Whorf hypothesis”, named after two

early-20th-century American linguists,

who posited that the world is made up of

continuous realities (colour is a classic

Some from each group were told to name

the odours they encountered; others

were not. Then they were given a dis-

traction to clear their minds, followed by

a chance to recollect what they had

smelled. As expected, the experts per-

formed better than the amateurs—but

those who articulated their thoughts did

no better than those who had not.

Some who did not label the odours

out loud may have done so in their heads.

So the researchers conducted a second

experiment. Some subjects were dis-

tracted while sniffing by a requirement

to memorise a series of numbers, making

it harder for them to verbalise what they

smelled, even mentally. They did no

better or worse than a second group who

were given a visual distraction (memo-

rising a spatial pattern), or a control

group with no distractions.

The team conclude that olfactory

memory in wine experts, at least, is not

directly mediated by language. This is

not to say such language is useless.

Vinologists describe wines more consis-

tently than amateurs do, meaning that—

contrary to sceptical gibes about their

pretentiousness—they are not just mak-

ing up what they taste.

Ms Majid says that rather than ask

whether language affects cognition—

since it clearly seems to, at least some of

the time—the real question is what

functions it affects. Perception, dis-

crimination and memory are not the

same thing, and some might be swayed

by language more than others. Mr Croij-

mans compares words to a spotlight,

which may not give you the ability to

perceive things you could not otherwise,

but rather help separate them from the

background. That is a rather more posi-

tive version of Wittgenstein’s aphorism:

language not as a limit, but as a light.

example) that are chopped into discrete

categories by language. People perceive

what their vocabulary prompts them to.

An extreme version of this theory holds

that it would be difficult, even impossible

to distinguish colours—or wine odours or

flavours—without names for them.

On the other side of the debate are

those who say that although language is

indeed linked with cognition, it derives

from thought, rather than preceding it.

You can certainly think about things that

you have no labels for, they point out, or

you would be unable to learn new words.

Supposedly “untranslatable” words from

other tongues—which seem to suggest

that without the right language, compre-

hension is impossible—are not really

inscrutable; they can usually be explained

in longer expressions. One-word labels are

not the sole way to grasp things.

Into this dispute comes a new study of

wine experts and their mental labels. Ilja

Croijmans, Asifa Majid and their col-

leagues gave a host of wine experts and

amateurs a number of wines and wine-

related flavours (such as vanilla) to sniff.