
How Language Seems to Shape One's View of the World - tannerc
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/01/02/258376009/how-language-seems-to-shape-ones-view-of-the-world
======
Jongseong
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.

~~~
Buttons840
> 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...](http://www.amazon.com/Through-Language-Glass-Different-
Languages/dp/0312610491) ). 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?

~~~
thaumasiotes
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.

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

~~~
jgg
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](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-11181457)

~~~
ethanpoole
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.

~~~
jgg
If a writing system doesn't count (it's a fair point, and I understand what
you're saying), then how does one counter the evidence in the article that one
speaker of one language does a task better than speakers of a different
language?

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.

~~~
thaumasiotes
How does French qualify as using a base-20 counting system? Intuitively, I'd
expect that to mean

\- 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.

~~~
jgg
It is actually referred to as a "base 20" counting system, although I agree
that it isn't a very good one. It's definitely not a "pure" base-20 system,
but many numbers are expressed of a multiple of twenty + remainder.

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.

------
midas007
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](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=The+Stuff+of+Thought)

------
drdeadringer
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.

------
petercooper
The RadioLab episode on this topic was fascinating:
[http://www.radiolab.org/story/91725-words/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/91725-words/)

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

[http://www.radiolab.org/story/91728-words-that-change-the-
wo...](http://www.radiolab.org/story/91728-words-that-change-the-world/)

------
fuckpig
[http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Sapir%E...](http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Sapir%E2%80%93Whorf_hypothesis.html)

This was the left's justification for Political Correctness.

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

~~~
bgilroy26
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.

~~~
midas007
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.

~~~
sitkack
Would it be the brits or the americans heading to the HR department for the
violations?

~~~
midas007
Brits. There is constant teasing and innuendo, and everything's fair game.

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

