Animals and Moving Things

I just finished reading Fuchsia Dunlop's memoir of eating her way through China, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper. It's quite good. Dunlop is an honest, entertaining, funny writer, and one can't help but admire the courage and gusto with which she sets about learning to eat such delicacies as goose intestines and rabbit's head.

More than most English writers, she demonstrates a willingness to forget her own cultural identity and plunge into the one in which she finds herself—even when, as she discovers, this appetite for assimilation might land her in ethically compromising situations.

But there was one passage in Dunlop's book that made me rather unhappy.

It comes where she discusses the casual cruelty with which stallholders in Chinese markets kill the animals whose meat they are selling. What could possibly explain such indifference to suffering?

Dunlop writes:

In English, as in most European languages, the words for the living things we eat are mostly derived from the Latin anima, which means air, breath, life. 'Creature', from the Latin for 'created', seems to connect animals with us as human beings in some divinely fashioned universe. We too are creatures, animated. In Chinese, the word for animal is dong wu, meaning 'moving thing'. Is it cruel to hurt something that (unless you are a fervent Buddhist) you simply see as a 'moving thing', scarcely even alive?

By such simplistic reasoning, I guess, no Chinese person could have any sort of compassion for anything they designated by dong wu, while Europeans will always be mindful of their oneness with other sentient beings, by virtue of the etymology of the words they use for them.

I have come across other statements of this sort—a memorable one theorized that, because the Chinese language lacks conditional tenses, Chinese speakers are incapable of forming hypotheses. I wish I'd kept the reference for that article, but at the time I must have simply thrown it away (with great force).

As must be evident from other posts on this blog, I am quite interested in etymology. But I don't make the mistake of believing that people are straitjacketed into a particular world view by their language.

My own mother regularly confuses he and she when speaking in English, because in her native Teochew, no difference is made in the gender of the third person singular pronoun. However, it would be absurd to imagine that she can't thereby tell the difference between males and females, wouldn't it?

This sort of reasoning is essentializing. And it's deterministic. But in all too many circles, it passes for sophisticated, informed commentary. Of all the common misapprehensions about language, this is surely one of the most unhelpful.

Perhaps all my troubles would be solved if I could find a country to move to in which the native language lacked a term for educated imbecility.