How Language Seems to Shape One's View of the World

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/01/02/258376009/how-language-seems-to-shape-ones-view-of-the-world

by tannerc • 13 years ago

38 47 13 years ago

npr.org

fuckpig2• 13 years ago

http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Sapir%E...

This was the left's justification for Political Correctness.

It's entirely dubious science with a clear agenda behind it: make thoughtcrime illegal.

bgilroy26• 13 years ago

It may be dubious science, but it's important from an 'Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten' perspective.

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.

midas0074• 13 years ago

Most British corporate shops, and startups also, transplanted to the US would have everyone headed to HR for sexual harassment training and hurt feelings lawsuits.

fuckpig2• 13 years ago

I don't agree that political correctness "equals" being polite. It's possible to be polite and not be PC. It's in fact possible to not be PC and not be offensive at all (note: politeness was originally a way of dealing with disagreements, including offense, not hiding them). However, our modern masters want us to see the two as conflatable...

ethanpoole4• 13 years ago

Considering that there is so much evidence against linguistic relativity, I do not understand why these types of stories keep appearing on HN.

DanBC• 13 years ago

Do you know enough to be able to write a great rebuttal article? Or to link to a great rebuttal article written by an expert?

I'd like to read that.

quomopete• 13 years ago

care to share some of that evidence with the rest of us?

jgg9• 13 years ago

What? What about the studies that show that reading Arabic literally uses different parts of your brain than when reading other languages, or even the evidence presented in the article?

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).

src: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-11181457

buss• 13 years ago

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'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.

ethanpoole4• 13 years ago

Reading and language are not the same thing, e.g. you can speak a language without being literate. You might therefore expect different writing systems to use different capabilities. Of course, "different parts of your brain" does not mean different capabilities. They could be the same capabilities instantiated differently in the brain.

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.

ethanpoole4• 13 years ago

Mark Baker's _The Atoms of Language_ and Steven Pinker's _The Language Instinct_ talk about the evidence against linguistic relativism. There is also a debate between Mark Baker (I believe) and some psychologist published online, but I couldn't find the link. I don't know of any other popular literature on the topic.

midas0074• 13 years ago

It's falls somewhere around psycholinguistics or cognitive sciences if you squint hard enough while looking at it, so then it becomes interesting.

Once someone feels they've mastered the hard sciences, the squishy sciences often become new, seductive mistresses.

sinkasapa• 13 years ago

I agree that the public obsession with this idea is strange. There is probably still room for debate and further research but public credulity for this idea far outreaches any possible reality.

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.

ethanpoole4• 13 years ago

The only reason that I didn't provide links in my original post is because I have had this discussion over and over. I get tired of having it.

Ologn• 13 years ago

I agree. The article is titled "How Language Seems To Shape One's View Of The World" whereas the scientific consensus for the past half century has been the opposite, and very little evidence has come to light over the past half century to change this. The beginning of the article is given to the ideas of a heterodox associate professor at UCSD. Further down in the article John McWhorter affirms the orthodox view (his speciality is slightly tangential to the question).

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.

auganov• 13 years ago

But the article and the whole hype is not purely about the science of linguistics. While I do think that randomly quoting some not-so relevant research is a bit discomforting it's still a super interesting topic. Almost anyone that has knows at least 2 languages very well will notice interesting differences in using them. Just as in that Nabokov anecdote. It's not necessarily a statement about some inherent properties of a language. It's something many individuals consistently experience. That using different languages yields different results even though their goal might be the same. I myself experience that almost everyday. It raises interesting questions. I don't know anything about linguistics, much less about what linguistic relativity means. But I would love to find explanations for this phenomenon. And I guess that's where they popularity comes from?

midas0074• 13 years ago

The apropos book is Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought. [0]

(language <~~> culture) ~~> world-view ~~> intention ~~> behavior ~~> result.

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=The+Stuff+of+Thought

petercooper• 13 years ago

The RadioLab episode on this topic was fascinating: http://www.radiolab.org/story/91725-words/

pstuart• 13 years ago

As is this episode as well (the second segment):

http://www.radiolab.org/story/91728-words-that-change-the-wo...

Jongseong2• 13 years ago

Proponents of linguistic relativity (or "Whorfianism") have come up with some fantastically absurd claims over the years about how thoughts are constrained by language. And in the popular imagination, these claims would inevitably entangle with stereotypes about speakers of different languages. So I don't blame people for dismissing any discussion about the relationship between language and cognition as fringe theory.

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.

sitkack2• 13 years ago

But if I am using Forth I am going to be much more cognizant of what is on the stack than if I was using say, Python.

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.

oakwhiz• 13 years ago

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.

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...

http://chinadigitaltimes.net/space/Grass-Mud_Horse_Lexicon

DanielStraight• 13 years ago

I'm not disagreeing, but even from my modest knowledge of German as a second language, I find myself inserting German words (or at least wanting to) into English because of gaps in English.

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.

Theodores• 13 years ago

What you say about how language does not constrain our thoughts is borne out by American English. This was the product of Noah Webster and his educational materials including the dictionary - 'Mirriam Webster'.

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?

Jongseong2• 13 years ago

Other than in matters of spelling (which belongs to the realm of written language and is thus outside the scope of usual discussions about language and cognition), Noah Webster did not introduce any significant differences in American English in terms of grammatical categories, syntax, etc.

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.

Buttons840• 13 years ago

Reality is much more subtle. Language only determines what we have to pay attention to.

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?

thaumasiotes3• 13 years ago

Well, again, the example you give is a point about the culture, not the language. Even if your language lacks words for "left" and "right", there's nothing stopping you from saying "there is an ant crawling up what would be your west leg if you were facing north".

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.

tetha• 13 years ago

Reality is much more subtle. Language only determines what we have to pay attention to.

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.

naturalethic• 13 years ago

The biggest problem, from my point of view, with language is the construction of objective statements to convey subjective values.

drdeadringer• 13 years ago

I thought that the author Ursula Le Guin dug into this in her literary work, for example in her book 'The Dispossessed'.

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.

How Language Seems to Shape One's View of the World

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