How Language Seems to Shape One's View of the World
npr.org
npr.org
But once you move away from the deterministic end of the spectrum, it is clear that there is some relationship after all between language and thought. The key point to understand is, as the linguist Roman Jakobson put it, that “languages differ essentially in what they _must_ convey and not in what they _may_ convey.”
An oft-repeated trope is that if a language does not have a word for some concept, then its speaker cannot understand this concept. This is plainly rubbish. Language does not constrain thought in that way. People can understand concepts without having the words to express them, and if need be, can always find new ways to express them in words, coining new terms if necessary.
Reality is much more subtle. Language only determines what we have to pay attention to. Take a look at the example of the distinction between cups and glasses in English as opposed to that between "chashka" and "stakan" in Russian. Suppose a Russian-English bilingual was presented with four objects—a cup-"chashka", a glass-"chashka", a cup-"stakan", and a glass-"stakan"—and instructed to group them into pairs of similar objects. What would the response be? Would it depend on the language that the instruction was given in? These are the sorts of interesting questions that we can ask about language and cognition. Speakers of different languages are capable of performing all the same cognitive tasks, but different languages may privilege different pathways to the solution.
What is possible and what is easy or normal are often far apart.
What about compile time macros or run time macros? Users of languages that do not have those features often have a hard time grasping them. Yet they are totally possible in most languages we use today (eval,Janino,etc).
EDIT: Apparently linguistic relativity says, if there isn't a word for it then I can't understand it (to horribly paraphrase). Is that a somewhat correct interpretation? Yes, you said that.
I guess my conjecture is that while I don't agree with LR if that is the definition, the semantics of the language definitely change what is easily expressed (no shit), the aborigine girls are constantly aware of their position vector, most people are not. The way they use language has shaped their thinking.
You can find some very interesting examples of this from Chinese internet terminology. In an environment where "thoughtcrime" exists in some form, Chinese internet users have developed a lexicon of strange-sounding euphemisms for things that are forbidden to be discussed.
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/space/The_Grass-Mud_Horse_Lexic...
It's not that I can't say "create" or "make" and tack on some extra words to imply a craft/handicraft/tinkering meaning. I just find that without the word "basteln", a lot of times even though I could, I don't. "Basteln" is a great word for everyday speech that there simply isn't a good equivalent of in English. (Ok, for gamers, you can probably use "craft" as a verb and get the basic meaning, but most people don't use the word that way.) I don't find it hard to believe that I would use that meaning more often if I had a simple word for it.
The rationale was to move the language away from 'aristocratic' English and to make things secular. Obviously the spellings survived - 'color' - but god somehow thrived in America (we are secular in the UK).
Webster was well aware that language could constrain thought or at least shape it, this was the rationale behind his work. However, do Americans think differently in subtle ways compared to Brits due to the changes to the language made aeons ago by Webster?
Any influence he might have had was in matters of diction in the sense of vocabulary and stylistic choices. If Webster's educational materials were intended to be secular, they achieved this by choosing expressions that avoid religious references, for example, not by changing the building blocks of the language to make secular thoughts easier to express. The relationship between diction and cognition may be an interesting topic in itself, but it's not what we mean when we usually discuss language and cognition, where we are concerned with the structural aspects of the language itself, e.g. its tense or pronoun system, not the stylistic choice of what we express with it.
Yes. I've read a entertaining book on the subject ( http://www.amazon.com/Through-Language-Glass-Different-Langu... ). Especially fascinating was the Guugu Yimithirr language, which has no words for relative directions, no "left" or "right". Speakers of this language gained an amazing ability to know compass directions. If you lead them through a winding museum and then ask them to describe the Mona Lisa they would: "It's a lady, facing east." The Guugu Yimithirr forces everyone to be aware of compass directions at all times, and they get good at it.
The book draws the same conclusion: language forces us to learn, and reveal in conversation, certain concepts; but it does not limit our ability to understand foreign concepts.
The fun question then: what concepts does English force us to be aware of?
As to the conclusion you report, the first part ("language forces us to learn certain concepts") is obviously correct; the second ("language forces us to reveal certain concepts in conversation") is not so -- people are routinely blasted for speaking "evasively". If you really care about not revealing a certain piece of information, there's always a way to do it (although you may reveal that you're hiding something, or at least talking in a very shifty manner).
> The fun question then: what concepts does English force us to be aware of?
Rather than a direct answer to this, I want to talk about some related observations I've made.
- In English, third-person singular pronouns ("he", "she", "it", and their inflections) are obligatorily gendered; they are marked for a sense of personhood, intimacy, or animacy ("it" vs "he"/"she") and for sex ("he" vs "she"). So, in the sense you reference, English "forces" speakers to be aware of whether the people they're talking about are male or female.
The example is not a trivial one; in Mandarin Chinese there is only one third person pronoun ("ta"). Chinese-speaking English learners routinely use the wrong pronoun in their English speech. And it's also frequent for a sentence, or longer stretch of speech, in spoken Chinese to make no real indication of what the sex of the person under discussion is.
However... Chinese people maintain the basically 100% awareness of what sex people are that you'd expect, regardless of the latitude their language allows them to ignore it.
If you put it that way, it's as obvious as a brick wall and I'm wondering why there is no way further onwards here.
Thinking about it: Language didn't develop without reason, I'm pretty sure. Language developed to communicate more precisely, since it provided an advantage to communicate more efficiently. Thus, language only expresses what it needs to express and develops from there.
In a sense, which I find rather funny, you don't have to venture into different lands to find linguistic problems. Just look around in your company. We developers have words for things and our marketing guys don't even know that these things exist, and I'm darned sure it's the other way around, too.
Similarly, the inuit have tons of words for snow, and I have like... 6. I don't even know how many forms and characteristics of snow they even distinguish there.
I'd like to read that.
Even intuitively, it would make sense that different languages/cultures might distinguish or understand different concepts differently...since this is HN, imagine asking a trial of 100 people who have programmed in nothing but COBOL their whole life to explain monads or continuations intuitively, and how they'd use them in practice, compared to a trial of 100 who understood Scheme and Haskell. I think the results would be pretty obvious. Why would structures and concepts in human language be any different?
I really don't understand the political posturing behind denying linguistic relativism (not that you're necessarily doing that, of course).
I'm not a linguist, but have recently started to become familiar with parts of it. I don't think you can reasonably make the comparison between engineered computer languages and our innate language abilities. There's ample evidence for a universal grammar, and that languages are not engineered so much as match patterns we're wired to recognize and be able to manipulate. I can stretch your analogy only as far as recognizing the different grammatical constructs that different languages employ (eg English is subject-verb-object and native English speakers first have trouble understanding and reproducing object-subject-verb constructions but eventually get it).
Human languages have nothing truly comparable to the situation you describe. Just because computer languages are called "languages" doesn't mean that it can actually map to a human language.
There is actually quite a lot of evidence against a universal grammar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar#Criticisms), and I don't understand how one could even begin to say that everyone necessarily develops the same grammatical concepts at any useful degree of practicality. The idea of a subjunctive tense only exists implicitly in English, yet is prevalent in many Romance languages (and others). In Ancient Greek, the concept of singular and plural were joined distinctly by the concept of pair, which exists currently in no language that I can think of (and certainly isn't popular if it exists). In English, nouns are not explicitly marked to indicate role in the sentence (left up to ordering and ultimately subjective, implicit interpretation), which is easily taken care of in other languages like German, Russian and Hungarian with a case system. Hell, English doesn't even have a stand-alone future tense (i.e., a verb conjugation) ...how exactly can we make any argument for a universal grammar, when there exists so many grammatical concepts in other languages that aren't actually possible in any explicit sense even in English? If I've misunderstood your usage of the phrase "Universal Grammar", I apologize for my ignorance.
The theory is that the principles of universal grammar arise directly from the structure of the brain, while the parameters are set during language acquisition.
From the perspective of an adherent of the principles and parameters variety of universal grammar, the examples of cross-linguistic variation you mention are not all that radical. A much stronger challenge to universal grammar is the existence of the Pirahã language, which (it has been argued) cannot express recursion, which would otherwise be a linguistic universal.
I still can't help but believe that, in practice the 'less radical' points I mentioned, like tense, mood and case (which I think would be switches, right?) arise differently in different contexts, if at all, owing to differences in cognition in various groups, and thus reinforces that mode of cognition in someone who learns the language.
The difference in morphology between, say, Ancient Greek and Modern English is pretty drastic, so what gives? In fact, I don't think English has ever been as morphologically-complex as Ancient Greek, and yet some hypothesize that they even descended from the same Indo-European language...if both languages start out from the same point, but evolve with a completely-different grammatical structure that makes different concepts explicit or notable, why would that happen in light of a true universal grammar that is inherent to everyone?
It's one thing to say that everyone at a certain intellectual level have a capacity to understand and use certain grammatical constructs, but to claim them as inherent to all people seems sketchy...
>The theory is that the principles of universal grammar arise directly from the structure of the brain, while the parameters are set during language acquisition.
Wouldn't that prove that language inherently affects cognition, and thus proves linguistic relativism? I don't think you actually made a point in favor of linguistic relativism, but that was the theme of this whole discussion thread.
The surface grammar — what actually comes out of the speaker's mouth — doesn't directly reflect the underlying grammar/syntax, though. The 25-syllable Cree word will tree in pretty much the same way as the 18-word English sentence it replaces. The tonal variations a native English speaker uses convey the same information as the pragmatic particles a Mandarin speaker has to include at the end of every utterance. (We literates are often prone to forgetting that these squiggly marks are to language what choreographic notation is to dance or staff notation is to music.) We might not always be aware of the mechanics of including things like evidential marking, ergativity or pragmatics, but we do it nonetheless. And we've replaced (for the moment, at least) most of our tense and case markings with entire words. The syntax is structurally the same, we just add the word "from" instead of adding the ablative case ending. And really, does anybody actually need grammatical gender? (See Twain's The Awful German language for a reductio ad absurdum.)
I agree that we can accomplish specific meanings without explicit grammatical structure, but the rabbit hole we were tumbling down was the simple idea that the prominence of a grammatical construct might facilitate a different kind of thinking than in a language that doesn't contain said construct.
Grammatical gender is a rarely-useful concept, I agree.
No, it wouldn't. It's not the language that is affecting how the brain works here; it's the other way around. The theory of universal grammar can be viewed in part as an explicit rejection of linguistic relativity.
> I don't think you actually made a point in favor of linguistic relativism, but that was the theme of this whole discussion thread.
I was responding to your comment:
> If I've misunderstood your usage of the phrase "Universal Grammar", I apologize for my ignorance.
I had thought you might be interested in more information on what "universal grammar" is supposed to mean. I was not attempting to take a position on linguistic relativism.
I thought you said certain parameters were set during language acquisition, which would mean that the language inherently modifies how you think.
> I had thought you might be interested in more information on what "universal grammar" is supposed to mean. I was not attempting to take a position on linguistic relativism.
I understand, thank you.
I can't say I understand what you mean by implicit, but this is a very strange thing to say. The following sentences use a subjunctive verb:
1. I demand that you return my saw.
2. I will ask that he not show overt disrespect in my class.
As you can see, the english subjunctive form (subjunctive is not a tense; it is a mood) is productive and applies to any verb in the language (and is different from the present tense for every verb in the language), which places it on roughly the same level of existence as, say, the past tense.
While English may not have a dual number, a case system (anymore, though it's still seen vestigially in the pronouns), or a verb conjugation expressing the future tense, the point is that English speakers are not constrained in what they are capable of expressing.
For the dual number, we simply say "two cows" or "both cows". To express the future, we have "will", "be going to", or a present (progressive) future construction like:
"We play tennis on Saturday" / "We are playing tennis on Saturday"
Whereas other languages use case to express certain semantic/grammatical relationships, English fills this void with word order and a slew of prepositions.
So at worst English speakers expend a few extra syllables on certain ideas. But there is no limitation on expression or cognition, which is the claim made by a strong version Sapir-Whorf.
I do not believe someone is explicitly constrained by the language, but I do believe that the explicit existence of certain concepts can facilitate a different kind of thinking more naturally than in other languages, which is the only real point I'm trying to back up.
It may very well be that speakers of a language with feature A can perform some task better than speakers of a language without feature A. However, it does not meant that the speakers have different cognitive capabilities (e.g. you can provide sufficient task training), which is the ultimate argument of people supporting linguistic relativity.
I cannot comment on the political motivations to deny linguistic relativism. I am just a linguist.
If my language is, for example, French or (older) Welsh, and my counting system is vigesimal (base 20), why is it wrong to claim that a person who speaks French would have an easier time with the basic idea of base 20 math, or just counting in terms of 20's, than a native English speaker, assuming no extra training on the part of either? Why is it wrong to assume that a language with a case system would yield native speakers who were better at explicitly identifying the subject and object of a sentence than speakers of languages that don't have a case system?
I just have a hard time grasping how people conditioned to think a certain way via their (or, a) language couldn't have a better understanding of some concepts than others.
>I cannot comment on the political motivations to deny linguistic relativism. I am just a linguist.
Sorry if you felt that I was pigeonholing you, thanks for your input.
- special words for the numbers 1-19
- special words for 20, 40, 60, 80, 100, 120, ..., 380
- special words for 400, 8000, 160,000, etc.
Instead, what we actually see in French is
- special words for the numbers 1-16
- special words for 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, and 80
- special words for 100, 1000, 1,000,000, etc.
This is a base-10 system (with the odd quirk), as far as I can see.
Perhaps a better example of a feature in a language that would provide more prominent cognitive differences would be one of the languages that requires users to mark a statement based on how they know the fact (witness, second-hand account, etc.), whose names escape me. Ah well.
Once someone feels they've mastered the hard sciences, the squishy sciences often become new, seductive mistresses.
If you have studied linguistics much at all, you know that the strongest form of the hypothesis that language governs human perception has been "debunked". And it is appropriate to say debunked rather than disproved because of the way that the public latches on to the idea again and again without being presented with any convincing evidence, just little anecdotes and lazy science journalism.
I don't think the poster above is responsible for searching the Internet for everyone else to validate his claim, which is fairly easy to do. Here is a starting point:
http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/wcs/
One can also look in to the the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.
Again, further research in to this type of thing is justifiable but the evidence so far has been pretty convincing that linguistic relativity only exists in a fairly shallow sense, if at all. We don't live in Samuel Delany's Babel-17 universe. Objective reality, biology and even cultural influences will likely be seen to trump linguistic relativism again and again as factors that govern our perception of time, space, color and quantity.
There is a mountain of evidence supporting the orthodox view, and the Boroditsky's, the Daniel Everett's etc. have not come up with much conflicting evidence or compelling alternative hypotheses. Is there any prominent scientist in this or a related field who subscribes to these Sapir-Whorf type theories? The hey day of this idea was before World War II, and the alternative theories may get play on NPR and the like, but not within the scientific community. Until, as I said, compelling evidence to the contrary is seen.
(language <~~> culture) ~~> world-view ~~> intention ~~> behavior ~~> result.
There was a specific example of the difference between "This is the brush that I use" and "This is my brush". Ownership of the brush between the two statements is one of communal ownership and personal ownership.
http://www.radiolab.org/story/91728-words-that-change-the-wo...
This was the left's justification for Political Correctness.
It's entirely dubious science with a clear agenda behind it: make thoughtcrime illegal.
Many of my friends have the "fuck em if they can't take a joke" outlook on political correctness, so I get it. On the other hand, it is more difficult to mix with strangers and new social groups when you aren't used to being polite a lot of the time.