'What's interesting to me is exactly which parts of language change, and which don’t change. I’m especially fascinated with how the way people talk about things influences the way they perceive those things' said prof. Richard J. Whitt, a linguist from University of Nottingham, who came to Gdańsk as part of the 'Visiting Professors' initiative. We asked our guest about his stay and research interest.

Marcel Jakubowski: – What did you do during your two-week stay at the University of Gdańsk?

Prof. Richard J. Whitt: – I gave 2 lectures — one at the Gdańsk Medical School and one here at the Faculty of Languages. The lecture for medicine students focused more on childbirth. I talked about the history of midwifery and the language surrounding this topic. The one I gave at the University of Gdańsk, also touched upon those subjects, but I focused more on the technical linguistic aspects and what my research has been over the last few years. I've also taught an English and German language class. As for my research activities, I've been collaborating with dr Karolina Rudnicka. We hope that our little project will lead to something bigger. It's been quite busy, but also very enjoyable.

– You gave a lecture on early modern medical discourse in English and German. What can we learn about those times from the language that was used?

 – With the type of research I do, we can see how language is changing as society, culture, or medical practice is changing. It's not really a surprising phenomenon, but what's interesting to me is exactly which parts of language change, and which don’t change. I’m especially fascinated with how the way people talk about things influences the way they perceive those things. This is an age-old question in linguistics that was summed up in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It’s particularly relevant to the language surrounding childbirth and midwifery. For example, if a woman is told that she has an ‘irritable’ uterus, how will she feel about herself? Where did those labels come from? What was the previous name for this illness?

– As you said, language is reactive, but were there some situations in history when it was proactive? So the usage of words influenced or changed the culture?

 – That's a whole other can of worms. How much can you legislate language and its usage? In medicine, for example: there are children, who might have been born with maybe certain disabilities like hearing or mental difficulties. In English, people used to call them 'deaf-and-dumb' or 'retarded' and that was the medical language, but this clearly became pejorative in the larger societal context. So we decided, that we should use less judgmental terms. Currently, someone has a hearing difficulty or a hearing impairment. In midwifery, there are some talks about the miscarriage terminology. Some movements claim, that saying things like a woman has an irritable uterus has a psychologically detrimental effect on her. I'm not sure what the case in Polish and German is, but I know that in the UK some people consider this an issue. It’s tricky to navigate this environment, because at one point in time words like 'deaf-and-dumb' weren't really judgmental, but then they start to have this negative connotations and…

– They become insults…

 –  Yes, actually something very interesting has happened in English studies recently. In Britain, we refer to the period from 410-1066AD as the Anglo-Saxon period. At my university, you'd have a class called 'Anglo-Saxon poetry', but then something changed when Donald Trump got elected. Far-right groups became more public and open, and they harkened back to older times, almost like what Hitler did with Germanic history. They started to use terms like 'Anglo-Saxon heritage' on social media. After some time, people were confused whether, someone was talking about white supremacist ideas or about the field of old English studies. Some organisations then decided to actually avoid the word Anglo-Saxon entirely. Even at my university, they changed the class from 'Anglo-Saxon Poetry' to 'Old English Poetry'. It’s hard to blame them, you don’t want your class, exposition, publication, or organisation to be somehow associated with white supremacy.

– In Polish, we also used to say 'disabled person', but now we say 'person with disabilities'.

 – That happened in English, too. I mean, we moved away from 'deaf-and-dumb' to  'handicapped person', but the disability shouldn’t be someone’s main characteristic, so now we say 'person living with a handicap'. It's a good example of how a term can influence a person or a societal perspective.

– Your research area is language concerning the topic of midwifery. It seems like a very specific discipline. What interested you in it?

Midwifery was more interesting to me, because it involves gender dynamics. Women give birth, but also midwifery was probably one of the few medical fields filled mainly with female practitioners. Aside from the medical things you have, also these complicated social shifts going on. I thought that it would be a particularly interesting thing to look at and lo and behold, so many things have come up. I started to get really into it during my wife's pregnancy with our first child. Maybe I wanted to intellectually understand what's going on and what's happening. As only an academic can.

– Was the 20th century the most dynamic period for the midwifery and for the whole discourse surrounding it?

 – I tend to go earlier than that. The 20th century has had some big things happen in it, but the biggest changes happened way before that. If you go back to the 16th or 17th century, childbirth wasn’t even considered a medical phenomenon. That changed throughout the next centuries. I've been focusing on this shift up to the 19th century. You can see the path of this discipline from pregnancy not being considered a medical phenomenon to midwives, doctors, men, surgeons getting more involved, which brought it into the medical system. The changes from 19th century onwards happened because of big advancements in other fields like anaesthesiology or virology. The 16th, 17th and 18th was the time of purely internal changes.

– You’ve studied the same texts about midwifery in German and English. What is lost in translation between those two languages?

 – What gets lost, if anything gets lost, it's a more general thing. There might be a word that you can translate from English to German or the other way around, but somehow there's just something about this word that doesn't capture the whole meaning. It just doesn't have the same range. There is this German word ‘Einstellung’, which means someone’s mannerism and so on. I heard someone translate it into ‘disposition’, but there is something lost in this interpretation. It's these little, more abstract nuances that are the hardest to translate. The technical terminology like medical language is much easier to convert into English or German.

– One of your most cited research is about perception verbs in English and German and their evidentiality. Are there also some things lost in translation, some differences in  how those verbs are being used?

 – General perception verbs in some ways are easy to translate - sehen is ‘see’, hören is ‘hear’. But then you have aussehen, which in English would translate to ‘look’ not ‘see’. You can notice more crass differences with schmecken and riechen, which mean ‘taste’ and ‘smell’. I once heard my cousin say in German ‘that smells like something you’ll like’, which is a sentence you would never say in English. So when you get into idioms, you're just going to have different ways of expressing it. But for the most part, I found more similarities than differences. That’s because English and German are more historically related than for example English and Chinese.

– Probably the most heated debate concerning midwifery and pregnancy right now is abortion. Both sides use very different discourse. As a linguist, do you think that those two camps are able to communicate with each other when the language they use is so different?

 – Each side wants to make a rhetorical attempt to convince people. The pro-choice camp wants people to think in terms of women's agency, and the pro-life argument focuses on the fetus/baby. In some way, it all comes down to language. For example, pro-choice supporters would never agree to say things ‘kill the baby’ or ‘terminate the baby’; they would probably opt for ‘end the pregnancy’ or ‘terminate the pregnancy’. Can you in that context sit down and have an intelligent and well-informed discussion? I think it's possible if people understand their own assumptions and use of language, and then appreciate what the others are doing. It’s also a problem of our media, because you're less likely to take part in any sort of public forum without sensationalism. In an online environment, for example, algorithms are set up to promote videos with titles like 'Person X DESTROYS person Y'. I think if someone was broadcasting the conversation we’re having right now, a lot of people would probably find it very boring. In that context we can't have an intelligent, mainstream discussion, because the algorithms are not set up for that. But from a purely linguistic standpoint, if you're aware of how your language betrays your own assumptions and affects others, I think we could have a debate. The real challenge is to do that in the profit-driven media environment.

– Thank you.