"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it."
"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it."
Well, how reassuring!
All words that have lost meaning at this point.
If there's any way in which word usage influences our thoughts, there's not much evidence of it. E.g., there are ungendered languages, but the societies that use them are absolutely not more feminist than those where a gendered language is spoken. And suppressing slurs usually leads to substitution by other words, showing that the thought very much stays alive, independent of the word.
There can be other influences that lead to misogyny and other biases, and language may adapt to give expression to those thought patterns. But language also can influence thought patterns. For it not to do so it would have to be the lone exception among all of the stimulae we take in, which is extremely unlikely.
> the idea that language has an influence on your thought patterns.
What does language even mean in that statement? You can weaken it down all you want, but in the context of this topic, language means: word usage, and thoughts mean: racist, sexist, etc. opinions. Do these opinions get influenced by e.g. the food you eat? The sunset? The temperature of your living room? Those are stimuli, or at least external influences. Language is not a stimulus, but more of a skill. It's encoded in your brain, and it allows you to communicate.
To put it bluntly: is there any evidence that people who are forced to use "black" instead of "African-American" become less racist?
Does this not support at least the weak hypothesis?
There's this:
> The strong form of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis claims that people from different cultures think differently because of differences in their languages. ... Few sociolinguists would accept such a strong claim, but most accept the weaker claim of linguistic relativity, that language influences perceptions, thought, and, at least potentially, behavior.
And this:
> Linguistic relativity proposals are sometimes characterized as equivalent to linguistic determinism, that is the view that all thought is strictly determined by language. Such characterizations of the language–thought linkage bear little resemblance to the proposals of Sapir or Whorf, who spoke in more general terms about language influencing habitual patterns of thought, especially at the conceptual level. Indeed, no serious scholar working on the linguistic relativity problem as such has subscribed to a strict determinism.
My sense has long been that Sapir-Whorf is "debunked" in the popular consciousness but not among actual linguists, in part because of the confusion of linguistic determinism with linguistic relativity. Pop-sci sources characterize Sapir-Whorf as wholly deterministic, which it isn't and never was.
In the end, I'll trust my own gut on Sapir-Whorf over what the academy comes up with anyway, because there's a strong incentive to "disprove" it because it doesn't align with their current political values. My gut says that for linguistic relativity to not be true, language would have to be unique among all of our environmental stimulae in not influencing our thought patterns, and the odds of something so fundamental to our species being the lone exception are pretty darn slim.