

Language may shape human thought  - b-man
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6303-language-may-shape-human-thought.html

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tokenadult
From the article: "Gordon says this is the first convincing evidence that a
language lacking words for certain concepts could actually prevent speakers of
the language from understanding those concepts."

I've studied multiple different human languages over the years, and have also
studied the methods of linguistics fieldwork used when scientists encounter
previously unknown languages. I find it interesting that the article says
Gordon's work is the "first convincing evidence" for strong linguistic
relativity, as the strong linguistic relativity claim is a claim that has been
made over and over again, so I guess the previous claims are mostly doubted. I
doubt the claim here, as I doubt the previous claims. Peter Gordon has spent
most of his career attempting to produce publications from his field work with
this tiny tribe, but he hasn't even convinced other colleagues who do field
work there.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_people#Language>

"Some researchers, such as Prof. Peter Gordon of Columbia University, claim
that the Pirahã are incapable of learning numeracy. His colleague, Prof.
Daniel L. Everett, on the other hand, argues that the Pirahã are cognitively
capable of counting; they simply choose not to do so. They believe that their
culture is complete and does not need anything from outside cultures."

If the scientists and the subjects start out communicating using mostly
gestures, and perhaps a language that one side or the other had acquired only
poorly as a second language, how does either side know the full range of
communication available in the language of the other? (This is one of the
defects of much cross-cultural research in linguistics--something is declared
to be "impossible" for speakers of one language by investigators who didn't
grow up in a community of native speakers of that language.) Here's a link to
a PowerPoint describing the study:

[http://ling.umd.edu/~zukowski/courses/Spring2005/hon218L/Cha...](http://ling.umd.edu/~zukowski/courses/Spring2005/hon218L/Chaz-
Piraha.pdf)

People do learn from engaging in new activities--including speaking new
languages--and also from entering new environments while continuing to use
their native languages. As always in such studies, the difficult task is
disentangling what people learn from a new language and what people learn from
the environment that surrounds them, whatever the language. Some forms of
learning produce "imprinting," which then prevents highly malleable learning
on the same issue, but it's not clear that any human language does much to
constrain thinking about truly universal concepts of human experience.

The submitted article was submitted here with the (tentative) original title.
An even more cautious title might be "Researcher who has devoted his career to
obscure tribe thinks that the tribe is proof of a controversial concept, but
his colleague disagrees."

~~~
wisty
The argument is just a little circular, isn't it? The Piraha ignore colors and
numbers, they lack words for colors and numbers, so the lack of words must be
causing their general ignorance of colors and numbers.

It could be the other way round - people tend to come up with words (or terms)
for anything of interest to them. For example, linguists might come up with a
terms like "linguistic relativity" or "Sapir–Whorf hypothesis" for the
suspicion that linguistics drives thought.

It does ignore a very common principle of linguistics - that language is
flexible. If you don't have a word, people tend to invent one.

------
Jun8
Like Strong and Weak AI, there are stronger and weaker versions of the so-
called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (if you dig their writings, you'll see that
neither Sapir nor Whorf didn't really say most things attributed to them, and
definitely they did not propose the strong version, i.e. "language shapes
thought".

Up until recently, c. 90s, Whorf was often derided (and ridiculed) in most
linguistic circles as being an amateur or worse, a nut job (he was a chemical
engineer by profession), e.g. see Pinker's _The Language Instinct_. This was
because of the prevalence of universal grammar idea of the Chomsky school,
that held sway in Linguistics, especially in the US. Only recently researchers
have started to revisit the idea thoroughly and gave it its due merit (for an
early, ~mid 80s, and influential debate on the subject, read this paper about
the debate between Bloom and Au about whether the lack of counterfactuals in
Chinese hampers their analysis of complex counterfactual sentences
[http://groups.psych.northwestern.edu/gentner/papers/YehGentn...](http://groups.psych.northwestern.edu/gentner/papers/YehGentner05.pdf)).

People resist the Whorf hypothesis from a purely political grounds, too,
thinking that accepting it would lead to cultural relativism.

That being said, although the idea seems intuitively correct, there are
difficulties when you start to think more. The analogy with programming
languages goes only so far, there you are trying to translate a task,
described in your native language, e.g. language, into a programming language.
If language limits thought, the expressions of thought should be done (partly)
in a non-linguistic and more rich way. Not very many linguistics, cognitive
scientists, or philosophers would take this view, I think, but there are some
who do, e.g. Fodor, who proposes that thought are expressed in a "language of
thought" distinct from native language.

This is a fascinating subject, if you have a few hours (or days) to sink,
check out the Language of Thought entry of the Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy: <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/>

------
DanielRibeiro
Sapir Whorf all over again?[1]

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-
Whorf_hypothesis#Computer...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-
Whorf_hypothesis#Computer_coding_language_conceptual_correlate)

~~~
jensnockert
Yes, and I think most programmers have profoundly experienced the effect, you
are not thinking the same way before and after learning a new programming
paradigm.

You don't think the same way after learning LISP, Erlang, or...

~~~
DanielRibeiro
Precisely the arguments of many posts about programming:

* <http://brandonbyars.com/2008/05/13/beating-sapir-whorf/>

* The creator of ruby on the "The power and philosophy of ruby: or how to create Babel-17" [1][2][3]

However these usually imply the weak version of Sapir Whorf, not the strong
one.

[1] <http://www.rubyist.net/~matz/slides/oscon2003/mgp00001.html>

[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity#cite_note...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity#cite_note-48)

[3][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity#cite_ref-...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity#cite_ref-48)

~~~
wisty
Didn't Einstein say something like "all mathematical advances are notational"?

------
rednum
I remember reading about similar phenomenon concerning colours - people who
have one word for red and purple in their language treat them as same colour;
I can't find a link to those information provided in concise manner on this
topic. However, I think both of these facts are smaller than the title could
suggest - though it seems that usually we put 'things' we think about into
buckets (so if you put both 4 stones and 5 stones into bucket 'many' you can't
distinguish between them) labelled by words from language we use, it gives us
little insight on how language shapes our cognitive algorithms, which is much
more interesting question to me.

~~~
Jun8
I think you are referring to the famous Berlin and Kay study (here's a chapter
detailing it: <http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~kay/KBMM.ps>).

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peregrine
Fascinating topic and RadioLab did a really nice radio program on this here.

<http://www.radiolab.org/2010/aug/09/>

------
Typhon
Maybe language shapes thought. Or maybe thought shapes language. Or maybe they
both influence each other.

Actually, that last one, I think, is the most likely, since it's less
simplistic than the previous two.

Now, much has been written about the Piraha, and whether or not studying their
culture will revolutionize linguistics. See this very interesting link
<http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge213.html>

------
flashmob
How many people did they test this on? one, two or many?

~~~
rflrob
Many: "Gordon set seven Pirahã a variety of tasks."

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neovive
I wonder how this correlates to children growing up in bilingual households.
Does access to multiple language alter the thought processes. Do they learn to
think in one language vs. the other or do they think in both languages
depending on the task.

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bchjam
[http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/boroditsky09/boroditsky09_in...](http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/boroditsky09/boroditsky09_index.html)

is a good article on how language can/does affect thought

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latj
I believe this man went to brazil and then came back and presented the same
idea fifty years ago:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_Chagnon>

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ern
This seems to be the original paper from 2004:

[http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/surprise/llog/Gordon_Pi...](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/surprise/llog/Gordon_Piraha.pdf)

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dragoner
I always that its the other way, human thought determines the language

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totalc
This story has been circulating the internets for years since the original
article. Has there been additional research on the Pirahã?

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majmun
i always tought that it is other way around, that thoutgh shape language.
maybe my language was not good enough.

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heydenberk
It tickles me the way this title blithely summarizes a great deal of 20th
century postmodern philosophy.

~~~
bchjam
well, maybe

