

How language shapes thought - philh
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-language-shapes-thought&print=true

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keeptrying
Link to the full article in PDF which is also NOT under a pay wall.

<http://psychology.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/sci-am-2011.pdf>

I think anyone who knows more than one language implicitly realizes the
conclusions of this paper but she has some fascinating examples.

~~~
jsnell
That's a strong claim. It's possible that bilingual people behave differently
when using different languages as the article claims (I have my doubts), but
even so they might not be aware of it on any level. At least I don't think my
world view is affected in any way regardless of which language I'm using of
the 4 I know.

~~~
keeptrying
Are the four languages you know from the same root language or from similar
cultures?

Let's take Hindi and English.let's say I'm talking to "Fred" who is 15 years
older than me.

In english I would say " Fred how are you doing?"

The Hindi version would be "uncle friend how are you? (using the respectful
forms of the word "you"). And because I'm using the respectful form, I would
genuinely feel more respectful of all my elders.

~~~
jsnell
No, my native Finnish is not related to the other three (which are all
Germanic).

To take your example, as far as I know there's no difference in the respect I
feel for people when using a language where the courtesy form of "you" is
basically mandatory (German), archaic and basically never used (Finnish), or
non-existent (English). Now, maybe there is some effect there that I can't
notice that could be ferreted out with some psychological experiment. But the
original claim that everyone knowing more than one language would implicitly
be agreeing with the article is just not true.

~~~
kragen
Technically, it's the _familiar_ form of "you" that is non-existent in modern
English. It was "thou".

I agree that it's not at all obvious from my experience that there would be
such significant differences between languages.

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tokenadult
The strong version of this hypothesis is surely untrue. If it were true, we
might conclude that some languages that I speak that lack marked gender in the
languages' grammar are spoken among native speakers who are "less sexist" than
speakers of languages in which gender is strongly marked. The real-world
observation, if anything, is the other way around. I have to respectfully
disagree with the strong version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis.
Within each language grouping, people differ far more in their personal
thinking along the dimension of visual thinker or not, or auditory thinker or
not, than people differ from one another in thought patterns based on language
background.

My native language is General American English, and I grew up in what was
essentially a monolingual immediate family and neighborhood of English
speakers, although both of my parents had had some instruction in other
languages. All of my grandparents were born in the United States, but three of
the four spoke languages other than English at home, and my two maternal
grandparents had all of their schooling in German.

German as a second language was mandatory for all elementary pupils in fourth,
fifth, and sixth grade in my childhood school district, very unusual for the
United States. I had more German in junior high and senior high (in two
different states) and then Russian in senior high. I entered university as a
Russian major and immediately began taking Chinese, switching my major to
Chinese as I grew in delight for that language. I have had formal instruction
as an adult in Modern Standard Chinese (a.k.a. Mandarin), Cantonese, Biblical
Hebrew, Literary Chinese, Attic Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Japanese (first in the
medium of Chinese, then in English), Taiwanese, and Hakka, and various courses
in linguistics (also in the mediums of both English and Chinese). I have
engaged in self-study of Biblical Aramaic, Mongolian, Spanish, French, Latin,
Hungarian, Malay-Indonesian, Esperanto, Interlingua, etc., etc., etc. For
several years, my occupation was Chinese-English consecutive interpretation
for people traveling to the United States from Chinese-speaking places to meet
government officials or businesspersons here. My observations of many speakers
of many languages, and trying to think in two languages in the same
conversation while doing my interpreting work, convince me that people's
thoughts are much less constrained by their native languages than by the
family backgrounds they have, the educations they receive, and the mass media
they consume.

~~~
meric
>> The strong version of this hypothesis is surely untrue. If it were true, we
might conclude that some languages that I speak that lack marked gender in the
languages' grammar are spoken among native speakers who are "less sexist" than
speakers of languages in which gender is strongly marked. The real-world
observation, if anything, is the other way around. I have to respectfully
disagree with the strong version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis.
Within each language grouping, people differ far more in their personal
thinking along the dimension of visual thinker or not, or auditory thinker or
not, than people differ from one another in thought patterns based on language
background.

"The real-world observation, if anything, is the other way around." You have
surely not certainly convinced me that languages and thought are not
correlated.

Continuing along your observations: Perhaps speakers of languages with marked
genders respect differences between two genders. "Equal but different".
Speakers of other languages may try to fit both genders into the same
stereotypes and find their expectations are not met, resulting in a "sexist"
response.

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lars512
This article is effectively discussing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which in
its strong form says that language constrains the thoughts you can have, and
in it's weak form says that language merely influences your thoughts.
Wikipedia's article on linguistic relativity probably explains it better.

The strong form is clearly false -- when was the last time you wanted to say
something but struggled to find the right word that expressed just the nuance
you meant? In the end, you may have settled for a more complicated
explanation, simply because you didn't know of an English word that fitted.
The lack of the word didn't stop you having the thought or feeling though.

On the other hand, the weak hypothesis is clearly true. Some of the article's
examples show that you can't have simple expressions in some languages without
being expressing gender, compass direction, seniority, etc. To express these
things, you need to mentally aware of them, at least in the sense of having
some background cognitive machinery that makes it available to you when
forming utterances.

It will be very interesting to see how the evidence converges over time.

~~~
w1ntermute
This is why if I learn a second language, I would want it to be Ilaksh - it's
an _a priori_ philosophical/logical language. I wonder what kind of effect
learning a language like that would have on my ability to reason.

------
Meai
That is a very superficial conclusion, and I'm eager to expand on it. The
environment was there first, not language. Sure, language is not as fast
changing as the environment, so there is some delay which people apparently
interpret as "language makes you think in non-obvious ways", but the reality
is, that language is pretty much exactly as efficient as it can be and it is
constantly adapting to be an optimal fit for the surroundings.

Example: When I say: "You are a police man", then one might say that I'm
technically wrong. There is nothing about you that makes you intrinsically a
"police" man. You might say that your job doesn't define you. But here is the
thing: What you do, actually defines you very well in our society. It is very
efficient to say: "you are a loser", instead of saying the 'fairer' version:
"you are behaving like a loser" because in all likelihood, his behaviour will
not change, and if it ever does, you can change if you ever see him again.

------
mconnor
There is an interesting discussion (take down?) of a set of these experiments
as referenced in Lera Boroditsky's previous WSJ piece at language log:

<http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2592>

Of course Liberman seems to be firmly against this new spate of Sapir-Whorf
ideas. Personally I think the distinction between languages is less relevant
than distinction between metaphors used, which of course may vary by language.
This manifests itself in cases even with single language speakers: if readers
are given two different metaphors for the same topic, they will behave
differently (crime as a virus vs. crime as a beast being their example).

[http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...](http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0016782)

Which the US government is interested in for terrorist understanding:

[http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/05/why-
ar...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/05/why-are-spy-
researchers-building-a-metaphor-program/239402/)

------
george_morgan
I’ve often wondered if there is a parallel to the concept of Turing-
completeness in linguistics. Once a language possesses certain principle
structures, would it be capable of expressing all human thought?

I understand that linguistic relativity argues that a language’s structure
directs the scope of thought, but couldn’t it be argued that these effects are
largely cultural?

Two Turing-complete programming languages can naturally suggest quite
different solutions when presented with the same problem, but they would both
ultimately solve the problem—or in the linguistics parallel, both express the
same thought.

Maybe we’re back to the adage that it’s easy to solve a problem, but much
harder to find a novel one to solve.

So there could still be a defence of linguistic/programming relativity. That
as certain programming languages invite particular problems to be solved,
certain spoken languages invite particular thoughts to be expressed.

~~~
andrewflnr
I'm not a linguist, but here goes:

I'm not sure any language can express ALL human thought. I think as you try to
fully specify a given thought, verbosity will increase without bound.
Everything is connected in a brain.

I do think that there is a certain set of ideas that, once a language can
express them, it's roughly equivalent to any other language that can express
the same ideas.

I used to be really interested in figuring out how to specify this set, but I
don't think it's too hard to achieve. It's not nearly as interesting a problem
as how to express thoughts efficiently. We don't usually need to consider
Turing-completeness when designing programming languages, either.

~~~
jackpirate
It's like programming. Sure you can do the same things in C++ and perl, but
which would you rather implement a text parser in? Surely a prolog hacker will
approach a problem differently than a javascript one?

Natural languages, I think are probably just as differentiated, even if it's
harder for us to recognize it.

------
miespanolesmalo
To eradicate bad thoughts and erase memories is the reason I started learning
Spanish: [http://dreaminespanol.com/spanish-lifehacks/eradicate-bad-
me...](http://dreaminespanol.com/spanish-lifehacks/eradicate-bad-memories-
learning-language/)

Okay, that and a hot Spanish woman I was interested in. Both were good
motivations to take on a new language.

------
knwang
Brought up in China and having been in the US for the last 11 years, I find it
very true how languages shape thoughts and behaviors. When I speak English a
different set of thoughts would come to me than when I speak Chinese. In fact
even when I _think_ in different languages I tend to see things in different
ways.

~~~
lachenmayer
I find exactly the same when I switch from German to English. I find that
German is so extremely structured that it really forces you to think about
what you're going to say. One thing I love about German too is the fact that
complicated words are really just simple words stuck together. This reveals
some amazing extra meanings sometimes. A great example of this is the word for
"vocabulary", "Wortschatz", which is made up of Wort = word, Schatz =
treasure. A treasure trove of words indeed!

~~~
yxhuvud
Yes, the ability to form new words like that is very powerful. In the
beginning the concatenated words tend to stay close to the original separate
meanings of the word, but sometimes they start to stray.

(and for the record, the swedish variant of vocabulary is 'ordförråd', which
literally mean a store of words)

~~~
mc32
The old word in english for vocabulary/glossary was 'wordhoard'. The influence
of Latin displaced its usage though.

Another linguistic curiosity in English, is that, for some people, when there
are two English words with equivalent meaning and one is originally English
and the other originally Latin, some people will feel the Latin-derived word
more weighty or of higher status than the English word.

For example: It's eminently clear she does not desire it. vs. It's utterly
clear she does not want it. Or expression: Pardon me? vs. What?

~~~
pessimizer
It's enlightening to notice, though I'm not sure it's much of a curiosity -
IIRC the Latin comes from Norman French, and they ruled English speakers for a
while, so everything Frenchy was marked as more refined.

------
TheNewAndy
If you enjoy this stuff, I would highly recommend reading "Le Ton Beu De
Marot" by Hofstadter (of Gödel, Escher, Bach fame). It is a really interesting
look at the issues of translating between languages. A lot of it is looking at
the difficulty of separating form and content (which is especially obvious in
poetry).

For example, if you were translating my paragraph up above, would you know
that I wanted to write "If you are interested in this stuff", but I didn't
because I used the word "interesting" in the next sentence? If you were
translating into a language which had two words which roughly meant
"interesting", then would it be more or less faithful to use those two words,
rather than translating "enjoy"?

------
andrewcooke
how do they separate culture from language? i am bilingual. i switch between
english and spanish depending on the cultural context. sure, my behaviour
changes - but why is that connected with the language, and not with the
culture?

~~~
brockf
Most of her research doesn't discuss external social behaviours, but rather
the core cognitive systems and responses to external phenomena. So, in a
heavily controlled experimental lab session with just you looking at stimuli,
your perceptual mechanisms may differ purely based on your primed language.
That would control for culture (or some might argue - I'm not entirely sure
culture isn't primed by language).

~~~
andrewcooke
but that is making some big assumptions about how different parts of the brain
are isolated from each other, isn't it? if my brain is one big neural net then
firing up a bunch of neurons that are trained in one language could also
activate neurons trained in the associated culture. there's still no way to
know that it's the choice of language, rather than the culture context, that
is important.

[edit:] traditionally you work around this kind of thing by finding subjects
that differ only in one variable. identical twins, for example, might better
show environmental differences, because they have common genomes. but while
that works for nature/nurture i have no idea how you do something similar for
culture/language.

------
levesque
Am I the only one who finds the introduction extremely weak?

I am all for the study of how language might shape thought, but then again, he
points to an example of a little girl living in an aboriginal community. In
this case it has nothing to do with the person's language, all with
environment in which they live.

~~~
brockf
It's meant to bring about the same "what the ?!?!" and "how the ?!?!?"
response you experienced. *She's pointing to something which we would all say
"it's just culture!" and explains how it is (might be) language.

------
carussell
Lera Boroditsky (the author of the Scientific American article) on how
language shapes thought on Fora.tv:
[http://fora.tv/2010/10/26/Lera_Boroditsky_How_Language_Shape...](http://fora.tv/2010/10/26/Lera_Boroditsky_How_Language_Shapes_Thought)
(1 hour 41 minutes).

------
gruseom
A good article filled with concrete examples. Anyone interested in how
language conditions thought should read it. (It's good enough to amortize the
annoyance of the pdf, linked elsewhere in this thread.) It has long seemed
like merely a matter of time before piles of evidence for Sapir-Whorf come to
light. Language is too big a part of who we are for things to be otherwise.

To take an example close to home, for me the most important factor in software
design is to develop language for talking about the problem, translate that
language into code, then evolve it as one learns more about the problem. It's
surprising how small changes in one's problem language (like renaming
something) can trigger a cascade of valuable ideas.

------
blakerobinson
This is really the basis for much of literary theory and modern criticism.

Ferdinand de Saussure used Structuralism to demonstrate relationships among
the sign, the signifier and the signified. This is basically the necessary
process of using the intangibilities of language to inadequately, but
necessarily, represent the tangibilities of the real world.

It's pretty interesting stuff.

~~~
rhizome
Language is a lossy codec for thought.

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hardy263
If it's daytime and we're outside, I can point north by pointing perpendicular
from where the sun is heading. If it's nighttime and we're outside, I can
point north by finding polaris.

Asking me to point north inside a building with my eyes closed is a different
story.

------
satori99
Fan's of Iain M banks "Culture", novels already know this

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture#Language>

------
kgc
<http://psychology.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/sci-am-2011.pdf>

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rhizome
Paywalled. Suffice it to say that the first paragraph doesn't mention Sapir-
Whorf at all.

~~~
davnola
The 3rd paragraph does <http://psychology.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/sci-
am-2011.pdf>

~~~
rhizome
The 3rd paragraph is behind the paywall.

