The soft version of this, that our thinking is influenced by the limits of language is almost certainly true. To give a very HN example, think about the work done in different programming languages or stacks. The way you think about a problem and how to solve it will be influenced by the language and tools you use (and know). You learn to think in a particular language or tool set. That doesn’t mean that you can’t think outside of it, but it does mean that there is a tendency to stay inside of it, inside the structures you know.
In the same way, some languages lend themselves more readily to certain culturally prevalent concepts. More nuanced words for snow or love, different color boundaries, different emotion words or nuances, etc.
I ran into this often when learning French as an emotion researcher. I’d try to express a scientific conception of a mood or emotion from English, and the French speaker would suggest a translation but it clearly didn’t mean exactly what I was going for. And the way the French speaker would push back was interesting, “we wouldn’t say it like that, we’d say it like this”. But the “this” and “that” were not exactly the same. I was watching us both be constrained by our language context. It could be pushed through, but the tendency was to just move forward as if we’d reached common ground but hadn’t fully.
In theory you can imagine a concept, not give it a name, and still use it. You can't communicate it through, which severely limits it's use. And somehow I suspect that naming the concept makes it easier to manipulate, so perhaps that is a 'weak' version of the theory?
Only dead languages are static, otherwise they can all adapt to new ideas as long as their sufficiently useful.
Sure some ideas might spread more easily as say an obvious and catchy campaign slogan, there is a maximum benefit to such advantages. “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work” is longer say “No taxation without representation” but number of works doesn’t seem to be a major limitation here. People just encode such ideas into otherwise meaningless slogans like “Promises Kept.” Soon people don’t wonder what “The wage gap” or “Pro life” is referring to.
How is this demonstrating anything? Can someone do the same who doesn't know what a gear is?
which, who knows, it might be!
I don’t have twenty different words for specific shades of green or types of snow, but can still easily recognize them and use them in my thinking.
This would not stop your ability to describe it, but would change how you relate it to other colors.
Can you conceive of a thought experiment that is impossible to put into words? Yes or no is acceptable, but if the answer is yes I guess I’ll have to take your word for it.
Of course, when you deal with real language your language itself is constrained. If you need to invent a bunch of new words does that count?
Yes, most of them are (or can be, with the addition of a couple of neologisms or borrowings). Just like you can do anything with any Turing-complete language. Languages and cultures still have biases and built-in world views.
For example, to most Europeans, the idea that you would need to estimate your social rank to properly address someone is utterly alien. In the best case, there is a polite form, which we also use for people we don’t know. So we don’t even think about social status when we ask someone what time it is. But there are languages where that isn’t the case at all, and this tends to make you constantly aware of the social status of the people around you. So it definitely does affect how tou think about things.
It does not mean that Europeans are incapable of understanding these things, just that it is not something they implicitly care about.
A phenomenon that is, at best, about a century old. Maybe.
That there aren’t grammatical forms or special declensions of words that signal rank relationships (as there are in, say, japanese) does not for an instant mean that we do not consciously choose linguistic styles based on social structure. Especially in Europe.
As I understand in Swedish you still need to know someone’s progression to address them politely “how would the software engineer like his coffee?”
Edit: also in Norway most women would wear head coverings when outside 100 years ago. We are not that far from having a culture most of us despise today.
Is it then logical to conclude that in the general area of the topic of discussion, there is in fact no noteworthy difference between Japanese and other cultures? There is nothing that exists in reality within this domain that has escaped the gaze of science?
German is well known for having different pronouns based on social rank and familiarity.
If this is true for formal languages -- why would wouldn't this phenomena be accentuated at the natural language level.
Stokes in the same location can have different impacts based on the language of the speaker.
This suggests there are architectural and processing differences.