How language shapes thought
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
http://psychology.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/sci-am-2011.pdf
I think anyone who knows more than one language implicitly realizes the conclusions of this paper but she has some fascinating examples.
Can a mod edit the link?
Let's take Hindi and English.let's say I'm talking to "Fred" who is 15 years older than me.
In english I would say " Fred how are you doing?"
The Hindi version would be "uncle friend how are you? (using the respectful forms of the word "you"). And because I'm using the respectful form, I would genuinely feel more respectful of all my elders.
To take your example, as far as I know there's no difference in the respect I feel for people when using a language where the courtesy form of "you" is basically mandatory (German), archaic and basically never used (Finnish), or non-existent (English). Now, maybe there is some effect there that I can't notice that could be ferreted out with some psychological experiment. But the original claim that everyone knowing more than one language would implicitly be agreeing with the article is just not true.
I agree that it's not at all obvious from my experience that there would be such significant differences between languages.
Or oppressed by them. Or annoyed by the (often) increased length from using honorifics.
That's a horrific blanket statement I see associated all the time with language-affecting-thought, and it flies in the face of people's actual behavior, and completely ignores social pressures that I would think are massively more influential. Which will influence your thought more: that your language has honorifics, or that you'll be pounded and/or ostracized for not using them? Our survival and social instincts are rather powerful.
The differences aren't necessarily as sweeping as 'world view'. I don't change political preferences by changing language.
My native language is General American English, and I grew up in what was essentially a monolingual immediate family and neighborhood of English speakers, although both of my parents had had some instruction in other languages. All of my grandparents were born in the United States, but three of the four spoke languages other than English at home, and my two maternal grandparents had all of their schooling in German.
German as a second language was mandatory for all elementary pupils in fourth, fifth, and sixth grade in my childhood school district, very unusual for the United States. I had more German in junior high and senior high (in two different states) and then Russian in senior high. I entered university as a Russian major and immediately began taking Chinese, switching my major to Chinese as I grew in delight for that language. I have had formal instruction as an adult in Modern Standard Chinese (a.k.a. Mandarin), Cantonese, Biblical Hebrew, Literary Chinese, Attic Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Japanese (first in the medium of Chinese, then in English), Taiwanese, and Hakka, and various courses in linguistics (also in the mediums of both English and Chinese). I have engaged in self-study of Biblical Aramaic, Mongolian, Spanish, French, Latin, Hungarian, Malay-Indonesian, Esperanto, Interlingua, etc., etc., etc. For several years, my occupation was Chinese-English consecutive interpretation for people traveling to the United States from Chinese-speaking places to meet government officials or businesspersons here. My observations of many speakers of many languages, and trying to think in two languages in the same conversation while doing my interpreting work, convince me that people's thoughts are much less constrained by their native languages than by the family backgrounds they have, the educations they receive, and the mass media they consume.
"The real-world observation, if anything, is the other way around." You have surely not certainly convinced me that languages and thought are not correlated.
Continuing along your observations: Perhaps speakers of languages with marked genders respect differences between two genders. "Equal but different". Speakers of other languages may try to fit both genders into the same stereotypes and find their expectations are not met, resulting in a "sexist" response.
The strong form is clearly false -- when was the last time you wanted to say something but struggled to find the right word that expressed just the nuance you meant? In the end, you may have settled for a more complicated explanation, simply because you didn't know of an English word that fitted. The lack of the word didn't stop you having the thought or feeling though.
On the other hand, the weak hypothesis is clearly true. Some of the article's examples show that you can't have simple expressions in some languages without being expressing gender, compass direction, seniority, etc. To express these things, you need to mentally aware of them, at least in the sense of having some background cognitive machinery that makes it available to you when forming utterances.
It will be very interesting to see how the evidence converges over time.
Example: When I say: "You are a police man", then one might say that I'm technically wrong. There is nothing about you that makes you intrinsically a "police" man. You might say that your job doesn't define you. But here is the thing: What you do, actually defines you very well in our society. It is very efficient to say: "you are a loser", instead of saying the 'fairer' version: "you are behaving like a loser" because in all likelihood, his behaviour will not change, and if it ever does, you can change if you ever see him again.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2592
Of course Liberman seems to be firmly against this new spate of Sapir-Whorf ideas. Personally I think the distinction between languages is less relevant than distinction between metaphors used, which of course may vary by language. This manifests itself in cases even with single language speakers: if readers are given two different metaphors for the same topic, they will behave differently (crime as a virus vs. crime as a beast being their example).
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...
Which the US government is interested in for terrorist understanding:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/05/why-ar...
I understand that linguistic relativity argues that a language’s structure directs the scope of thought, but couldn’t it be argued that these effects are largely cultural?
Two Turing-complete programming languages can naturally suggest quite different solutions when presented with the same problem, but they would both ultimately solve the problem—or in the linguistics parallel, both express the same thought.
Maybe we’re back to the adage that it’s easy to solve a problem, but much harder to find a novel one to solve.
So there could still be a defence of linguistic/programming relativity. That as certain programming languages invite particular problems to be solved, certain spoken languages invite particular thoughts to be expressed.
I'm not sure any language can express ALL human thought. I think as you try to fully specify a given thought, verbosity will increase without bound. Everything is connected in a brain.
I do think that there is a certain set of ideas that, once a language can express them, it's roughly equivalent to any other language that can express the same ideas.
I used to be really interested in figuring out how to specify this set, but I don't think it's too hard to achieve. It's not nearly as interesting a problem as how to express thoughts efficiently. We don't usually need to consider Turing-completeness when designing programming languages, either.
Natural languages, I think are probably just as differentiated, even if it's harder for us to recognize it.
Okay, that and a hot Spanish woman I was interested in. Both were good motivations to take on a new language.
(and for the record, the swedish variant of vocabulary is 'ordförråd', which literally mean a store of words)
Another linguistic curiosity in English, is that, for some people, when there are two English words with equivalent meaning and one is originally English and the other originally Latin, some people will feel the Latin-derived word more weighty or of higher status than the English word.
For example: It's eminently clear she does not desire it. vs. It's utterly clear she does not want it. Or expression: Pardon me? vs. What?
For example, if you were translating my paragraph up above, would you know that I wanted to write "If you are interested in this stuff", but I didn't because I used the word "interesting" in the next sentence? If you were translating into a language which had two words which roughly meant "interesting", then would it be more or less faithful to use those two words, rather than translating "enjoy"?
[edit:] traditionally you work around this kind of thing by finding subjects that differ only in one variable. identical twins, for example, might better show environmental differences, because they have common genomes. but while that works for nature/nurture i have no idea how you do something similar for culture/language.
I am all for the study of how language might shape thought, but then again, he points to an example of a little girl living in an aboriginal community. In this case it has nothing to do with the person's language, all with environment in which they live.
To take an example close to home, for me the most important factor in software design is to develop language for talking about the problem, translate that language into code, then evolve it as one learns more about the problem. It's surprising how small changes in one's problem language (like renaming something) can trigger a cascade of valuable ideas.
Ferdinand de Saussure used Structuralism to demonstrate relationships among the sign, the signifier and the signified. This is basically the necessary process of using the intangibilities of language to inadequately, but necessarily, represent the tangibilities of the real world.
It's pretty interesting stuff.
Asking me to point north inside a building with my eyes closed is a different story.